Memory

Throughout the novel, the author uses the first person narrator’s obsessive preoccupation with the day of the little boy’s accident in order to explore the powerful nature of memory. In her opening section of the novel, the unnamed narrator catalogs everything about the day of the accident that she can remember, saying that she does not “know how I could possibly have seen these details. The fizz of the beer popping into sparkles of air. Blades of grass straightening themselves as the liquid soaks in to the soil, the damp patch on my skirt shrinking and fading and drying in the sun” (8). The sensory details of this remembered day are even more vivid to the narrator than the sensory details of her surroundings in the narrative present. She goes on to remark at her inability to “understand why it seems so fresh in my...