The Narrator

The narrator is a new mother and the central character of the novel. Unlike the other characters, who are referred to throughout by their initial, the narrator is not given any form of name within the novel. This reflects the extent to which her whole identity has been subsumed into the role of mother: she is so completely defined by motherhood throughout the novel that she has lost all other defining characteristics including her name. Because the story is told from the narrator’s point of view, the lack of names for the other characters is a reflection of the narrator’s state of mind: she is so completely preoccupied with the practicalities of raising her newborn baby that everything else in her world becomes vague and undefined, including the names of everyone she knows and meets, all of whom are referred to only by a single...