At the Bottom of the River

The narrator of the text is omniscient and often provides details of her and her father’s thoughts. Although these thoughts can be considered presumptions about what her father is thinking, the poetic and even biblical way they are delivered conveys an almost otherworldly knowledge of this man’s thoughts and experiences. Even before the narrator’s spiritual journey in the river, this knowledge establishes her as simultaneously human and divine, connecting her girl to a broader sense of spirituality.

The narrator is also the story’s protagonist, and she undergoes a major internal change because of her father. At the start of the section that describes her own ideas and experiences, Kincaid portrays a bleak preoccupation with the idea of death and what it means. She acknowledges her father’s view of death futility and how he failed to appropriately understand it fit into his life. She remembers him telling her “‘[d]eath is natural’” in a “flat, matter-of-fact way, and then [he] laughed – a laugh so piercing that I felt my eardrums shred, I felt myself mocked” (71). Here, the narrator begins to contemplate the idea of death as “natural” and discovers that she finds this description unfulfilling.