At the Bottom of the River | At the Bottom of the River

At a glance:

Author: Jamaica Kincaid
First Published: 1982
Type of Work: Short stories
Setting: Antigua
Principal Characters: The Narrator, The Narrator’s Mother, The Narrator’s Father, The Red Woman
Genres: Short fiction, Impressionistic literature
Subjects: Girls, Maturation or coming of age, Self-discovery, Mothers, Parents and children, Philosophy or philosophers, Caribbean, Magic or magicians, Blacks, Gender roles, Immortality, Nature, Psychology or psychologists, Self, Supernatural, Superstition, Surrealism
Locales: Antigua, West Indies

The Stories

At the Bottom of the River is a series of ten short, impressionistic pieces that might almost be better called “prose pieces” rather than stories. Though the stories develop and have plots, they do not follow most narrative conventions. They do, however, form a tightly connected unit, in that at the center of each tale is the pain of separation of a daughter from her mother.

Although At the Bottom of the River resists easy categorization, categories are helpful in understanding it. To an extent, the pieces in this book can be read...

At the Bottom of the River | At the Bottom of the River

At a glance:

The Stories

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