Bryant Mangum is a member of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. In the following excerpt, he discusses Kincaid's "What I Have Been Doing Lately," and asserts that it offers a variation on "the mythic story of the fall of man."

The reader interested in the philosophical vision that informs all of Kincaid's work must come to terms with the allegory in "At the Bottom of the River." At its most basic level the story affirms the fall of man from innocence into knowledge. Based simply on the fact that the narrator is able to return in her vision to the undivided world, the reader may Each section of 'At the infer that the knowledge of the prelapsarian world constantly lures the individual who feels its existence back into union with it....

The reality of the actual world in which people must live, of course, invariably...