NARRATIVE
- Kathy is also an unreliable narrator.
- Her account is subjective, presenting events from only her point of view.
- She often states that she may be misremembering certain details.
- Kathy is also an unreliable narrator because she carefully guards her own feelings.
- Kathy never explicitly states the depths of her feelings for Tommy, for instance, although her love becomes increasingly clear as the narrative unfolds.
- Her narrative is a process of recovery and an attempt to make sense of her memories. She admits to forgetting and misremembering details, showing that memory is just as fragile as it is powerful. Her first-person narration also highlights the absence of other characters’ memories.
“There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham.”
- Chapter 1
- The memory of Hailsham serves as a touchstone for all of Kathy’s recollections.
- It is the place where her most important relationships begin, and the source for many of her happiest memories.
“If we’d left it at seeing the woman through the glass of her office, even if we’d followed her through the town then lost her, we could still have gone back to the Cottages excited and triumphant. But now, in that gallery, the woman was too close, much closer than we’d ever really wanted. And the more we heard and looked at her, the less she seemed like Ruth.”
- Chapter 14
- after Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, Chrissie, and Rodney have followed Ruth’s possible to an art gallery in Norfolk.
- Although the woman seems like a legitimate possible when viewed from afar, she does not look like Ruth from up close in the gallery.
“And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field, for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night.”
- Chapter 22
- Tommy’s temper tantrum on the muddy Hailsham football field, when Kathy also approached him and attempted to calm him down. Just as Tommy expressed his childhood frustrations and anxieties through tantrums
- The winds tugging at their clothes suggest the force of the future that threatens to pull them apart, while their embrace expresses a deeply human impulse to hold on in the face of this future.
“The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”
- Chapter 23.
- Kathy describes the aftermath of Tommy’s death, when she drove to a field in Norfolk and imagined him appearing on the horizon.
- Kathy’s muted description masks her deep grief and sorrow, much in the way that she has masked the depths of her feelings for Tommy throughout the novel.
