Narrator

The first person narrator of the novel remains unnamed throughout. She is also the main character of the novel. Her namelessness is due to the fact that she was torn from her home and family as a child. She does not remember her name and cannot relay it to the women. Although her lack of name is organic to her circumstances, it also further underscores the narrator’s detachment from herself. Indeed, throughout the majority of her childhood and adolescence, the narrator has no understanding of or real regard for her own body. She has never seen herself in a mirror. She also has no knowledge of anatomy before Anthea teaches her about her physicality.

When the narrator is roughly fifteen or sixteen years old, she begins to realize that there are things she does not know that the other women in her company do know. Although she...