Narrator

The first person narrator is the protagonist of the novel. Although her voice guides the narrative and her story and character are central to it, she remains nameless throughout. “Like any nameless narrator,” she says that she has obscured her identity because “I’ve just declined to introduce myself” (36). Although she apologizes for this lack of introduction, even claiming that she hates “novels with unnamed narrators” and “didn’t mean to write one,” she does not offer her name (36). She does identify as a writer, but also claims to hate novels about writers, as she finds writers to be “dull by themselves” and “intolerable when they gather” (36). She goes on to own the fact that because she is a writer and is writing about herself, she too is intolerable. Despite these admissions about herself, the narrator remains self-effacing throughout the novel. She attributes her evasiveness to her inability...