The Curse is a story about Mitchell Hayes, a forty-nine year old bartender who faces an internal conflict after witnessing a rape. Using a limited omniscient point of view, Dubus presents Mitchell as a round dynamic point of view character when he says that "he felt much older. He did not know what it was like to be very old, a shrunken and wrinkled man, but he assumed it was like this: fatigue beyond relieving by rest, by sleep." It is obvious that Mitchell changed the day of the rape when the narrator reveals that he feels Susan's hand "was a professional hand and he wanted from her something he had never wanted before: to lie in bed while she bathed him" just like she had bathed invalids for a living. Witnessing the rape and not taking any meaningful action to stop it leaves Mitchell Hayes with a fractured sense of honor. Mitchell feels ridden with guilt because he feels he should have done more for the young woman than just "looked once at her sounds, then looked down at the duck board he stood on, or at the belly or chest of a young man in front of him." The point of view works well for the story because the reader can see that even Mitchell recognizes the fact that other people in his life do not have any feelings against what he did or did not do. These characters, like Susan, her children, and the regulars at the bar, are all flat static characters that represent Mitchell's life before the incident, and do not change their perception of him. Dubus maintains the third person limited omniscient point of view throughout the entire story, however he does intermingle between present and past tense. This is done to illustrate to the reader that even though the rape has already occurred, the events are still creating turmoil in Mitchell's life. As Mitchell tries to go back to his life and get through his conflict the narrator takes the reader into Mitchell's broken state of mind again.
