Narrator

The narrator is the main character from whose perspective all of the events in the story unfold. While not identified by name, age, class, race, or even by a striking feature, the narrator is generally considered to be female. The only physically descriptive information the reader receives about the narrator is that her "shadow was small." The narrator's lack of a specific identity prevents the reader from definitively identifying her and thus allows for multiple interpretations of who the character is and what role she plays in the narrative. One reading of the narrator, offered by Diane Simmons in Jamaica Kincaid, is that she is a person forever caught in a "story of departure and loss" who "will never be the same as she was before she left." Bryant Mangum, in Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, alleges that the narrator symbolizes humankind's fall from innocence into...