Naturally they didn’t know which boy because they were from out of town, but they knew he was a boy for he’d been there a minute ago and simply hadn’t come up from a dive and were there sharks and couldn’t I for God’s sake stop asking questions and just get on with doing something.
-- Narrator (NA)

Importance: As well as providing some light relief (following the comedic image of the tourists “slithering up and down the bank, yanking at their own ears”), this sentence collapses the distinction between speaking voices and the narrative voice, conveying the babbling of the women while leaving the reader to infer what questions Pikelet is asking (12). There are no speech marks in the novel, but the effect here is particularly ingenious, setting the scene by making us imagine it – since we have to work out who is saying what.

I will always...
-- Narrator (NA)