Identity

The author writes the novel from the third person limited point of view in order to enact Saoirse’s search for self. Because the third person narrator inhabits Saoirse’s psyche throughout the novel, the reader has access to her private thoughts and intimate feelings. In the early chapters of the novel, Saoirse is a child. During this phase of her life, she relies upon her mother and grandmother to understand herself. Following Eileen’s parents’ unexpected visit in the chapter “Visitation,” Saoirse’s perspective on Eileen and Nana, and thus herself, begins to change. In “Knowledge,” after teenage Saoirse finds the photo from her parents’ wedding, the narrator says “only now was it all coming together in her head. Why there’d been such a falling-out. Why she’d never seen these people before. They were ashamed of her mother, and ashamed of her” (42). Prior...