Sean Phillips

Sean is the novel’s central character, its narrator and protagonist. There is no explicit identification of his age or race, but there is a sense that he is in his mid-thirties.

Sean's story consists of two primary, inter-twined elements. The first element, or narrative line, reveals the true nature of the incident that Sean refers to as an “accident” through his narration - until, that is, the final chapter of the book reveals just what that “accident” actually was. There is the sense throughout the book that, in the same way as Sean is keeping the truth about that “accident” a secret from the reader, he is doing so because he is himself in denial about that truth, until his contemplation and narration of the second key element of his story takes him to a place where such denial is no longer possible. That second element...