Narrator

The unnamed narrator is the main character of Checkout 19. Throughout the novel, she employs the first person plural, first person singular, third person, and second person points of view. Doing so allows her to capture and enact her feelings of “confusion and despair and desire and anger, irrepressible forces which [issue] out of the dissonance that [exists] between [her] interior life and the world around [her]” (79). Indeed, as a female artist, the narrator is often in search of new ways to express her truest self. In Chapter III, her reflections on her experience reading and rereading A Room with a View clarify her preoccupation with revisiting her memories. She explains that “as anyone does when they feel they’ve lost their way,” she has a need to “get right back to the beginning of myself” (108). Reflecting on her childhood experiences, her early writing processes, her historical reading habits...