Loss and Grief

The author locates her thematic explorations of loss and grief primarily within the opening chapter of the novel in order to capture the narrator’s distinct grieving experience. Although these thematic notions do recur in the subsequent three chapters, Chapter I focuses most plainly on the narrator’s mother’s death and the narrator’s response to it. By placing this event within the first chapter, the author is formally enacting the narrator’s belief that she can compartmentalize her grief in the past. Indeed, although she has been crippled by inarticulable sorrow throughout the majority of the chapter, at the chapter’s end, the narrator insists that “A shift had occurred and my mother’s death was no longer present but past, its recalling an understanding of pattern instead of wound” (55). The narrator’s outlook in this closing sentence of the chapter contrasts...