Point of View

“The Raspberry Room” is told from the first-person perspective of a speaker who recalls claiming a room-like opening inside a raspberry patch as her own personal sanctuary. At ten years old, the speaker remembers feeling uncomfortable in her dawning awareness of adult difficulties. The world seems too big to inhabit, so she looks for a place to slow down, rest, and reclaim her sense of herself. As a result, the speaker finds the Raspberry Room in her grandparents’ orchard. Despite her need for rest and retreat, the speaker works hard to access it. Her grit is evident in the way she repeatedly slides “under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore / [her] clothes and smeared [her] with juice” (11-12). However, the reward of a place wholly her own is too sweet to pass up on. The speaker’s time in the Raspberry Room leaves an indelible...