The Narrator

The only character that could be said to recur in this book is the narrator, particularly in the four short stories that are presented in first person. In those stories, the narrator could be regarded as representative of aspects of the author's personality. This is not to suggest that protagonists presented in third person in the other stories do not also derive from the author's experience of life, but the first-person male narrators have characteristics in common that unite them, at least loosely. In "Creation," the first-person narrator is an apparently well-to-do and rather jaded man who enjoys drifting in the netherworld of a tropical island on which he is temporarily stranded, first with one woman and then with another. In "Human Moments in World War III," an astronaut who wants to focus on the commonplace practicalities of his job is annoyed by the philosophizing of his...