SOURCE: Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “At the Bottom of the River (1983).” In Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion, pp. 49-83. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Paravisini-Gebert offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of the stories in At the Bottom of the River.

At the Bottom of the River, Kincaid's first book, gathers most of the fiction she had published in various magazines from 1978 to 1982. Of the ten stories in the collection, seven had appeared in the New Yorker; one (“What I Have Been Doing Lately”) had been published in the Paris Review; another (“My Mother”) echoes material included in a segment of “Antigua Crossings” in Rolling Stone. Of these stories only one, “Blackness,” was previously unpublished.

Kincaid's “prodigal use of wildly imaginative metaphors” makes the stories of At the Bottom of the River dense, sometimes difficult texts for the reader to decipher (CBY 1991, 332). Barney Bardsley, writing for the...