As a contemporary work of fiction (written after 1945), Those Bones Are Not My Child illustrates concerns about the individual's role in the society, concerns best revealed through narration. The novel's narration is always located in the third person, and yet, with a modern sweep, in a technique experimented with by James Joyce and, later, Virginia Woolf, plays with free indirect discourse, where the boundaries between narrator and character disappear although the third person voice does not. Experimenting with narration, Bambara is able to vacillate between her two main characters, Marzala and Spence, without impeding the pace of the novel, itself a frenzied search to find Sonny. In the aforementioned interview, Bambara explains her use of the narrator as a medium, or force, a magnet through which other people tell their stories. Such a narrator, she explains, is different from what she classifies as the narrator contained in EuroAmerican...