Point of View

The language of the story is generally reserved and objective, but it often indicates much stronger emotions just beneath the surface of the narrator’s seemingly placid diction. For example, some examples of the narrator’s strongest displays of emotion involve her recollections of being beaten as a child. She states, for example, that after being beaten, “I’d lie weeping in bed and make plans to run away” (306). Her emotion also becomes more apparent towards the end of the story, when she expresses her regrets regarding her relationship with her mother: “The person I would really have liked to talk to was my mother, who was no longer available” (318). This tension between the story’s more emotional aspects and its more reserved qualities implies that the narrator struggles with many profound emotions underneath a more reserved façade due to her personality and cultural...