Captivity

The author uses her speculative narrative world in order to reify her explorations concerning captivity. Indeed, the entirety of the protagonist and first person narrator’s reality is defined by the entrapping nature of her circumstances. As a child, she is ripped from her home and family and forced into imprisonment. Unable to recall her life prior to her life in the cage, the narrator is “reduced to calling a memory the sense of existing in the same place, with the same people and doing the same things—in other words, eating, excreting and sleeping” (4). It is not until she “suddenly found [her]self contemplating [her] situation,” that she realizes the unnatural nature of her reality (21). The other women’s allusions to and stories about life prior to life in the bunker particularly catalyze the narrator’s mental awakening. She begins to realize that there are...