In "I Stand Here Ironing," why is the point of view important in understanding the story?Also I don't understand the tone of the speaker.

Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" is told as an
interior monologue held by the mother who has been contacted by school officials about
her daugther.  The monologue of the narrator/mother consists of a
stream-of-consciousness response to the officials.  This structure provides a dramatic
context as well as establishing the narrator's confrontational tone in contrast to her
quiet, repressed personality.

In her essay, "I Stand Here
Ironing:  Motherhood as Experience and Metaphor." Joanne S. Frye
writes:

The
narrative structure....generates a unique capacity for metaphorical insight into the
knowledge that each individual--like the mother and the daughter--can act only from the
context of immediate personal limitations, but must nonetheless act through an sense of
individual sensibilty.

The
narrator does, indeed, act through a sense of individuality.  She reponds to the
questions asked of her, and begins to search for validity as well as demonstrating her
character as interruptions to her monolgue occur, interruptions that are caused by the
pressures of graduating for the fllowing school.  In the end, paradox of character is
illustrated through the dramatic "frame"  of the story that she does not care to express
to others.