Setting

This story is set in Clarke's native home of Barbados, the "island place" referred to in the story's title. Like the narrator and protagonist of his story, Clarke left Barbados as a young man in order to attend college in Canada. Thus, many of Clarke's stories are about immigrants who leave Barbados for North America. "This island place," in the story, represents not just home but the narrator's entire familial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic roots. Thus, "leaving this island place" represents for the narrator the sense that he is abandoning his cultural roots in pursuit of socioeconomic success in the white-dominated Western world.

Point of View

This story is narrated from the first-person point of view. This means that the narrator is a character in the story, and that the reader is given only information, thoughts, or ideas available to that character. In this story, the narrator is...