Point of View

The first person narrator is Ruth, who stands outside a great deal of the action just as she stands outside of the community and her family. When she describes her grandmother's feelings on looking back on her marriage, she discusses things her taciturn grandmother probably would not have told her. She imagines herself experiencing her grandmother's feelings based on small clues and close observation. This is the same method Ruth uses to cope with a world where she feels unsafe and uncertain. So when Ruth describes her grandmother mourning for a man who was dead long before Ruth was born, she is also describing her own mourning for a father she never knew and a stability she only briefly experienced during the years when she and Lucille were cared for by their grandmother.

Ruth speculates on what might have happened if this or that path had...