Entrapment

Through her unconventional stylistic patterns, the author crafts a complex narrative voice and structure that enacts her narrator's feelings of emotional and psychological entrapment. The author establishes this thematic interest in the novel's opening chapter, "The Cast." After introducing the major players in her story, the narrator attempts to identify the time and place in which her account should be set, saying, "But I had to think long and hard about the Time, since 'today' is an impossible word for me, even though I hear and say it daily, you can't escape it...This 'today' sends me flying into the utmost anxiety and the greatest haste, so that I can only write about it, or at best report whatever's going on" (4). Though the narrator says that the only way for her to confront her anxiety regarding "today" is to record its events, she also believes that...