30 pages • 1 hour read
Jamaica KincaidAt the Bottom of the River
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Tone
The tone of the text, or the way in which the story is told, shifts from despair and futility to hopeful. As the story opens, the author’s diction lends itself to an interpretation of the text as biblical or parabolic. The use of words and phrases like “For now here is a man” (63), “Look!” (65), “There it is now, dead, vanished into darkness, banished from life” (68), and “Now!” (70) establish this biblical, authoritative tone by paralleling the language in Genesis, the creation story in the Bible. This elevates the story’s message, placing it on the same level as a holy text.
In addition to the biblical tone, the text also uses a dark, futile tone in its middle section. With words and phrases like “Death on death on death. Dead lay everything” (68), “Dead is the past. Dead shall the future be” (69), and “Inevitable to life is death and not inevitable to death is life. Inevitable” (72), Kincaid establishes a bleak tone. Additionally, the repetition here evokes a funeral dirge, a type of meditative mourning music, and creates a futile tone; no matter what the characters or creatures in the text do, death is coming.
However, in the text’s conclusion, the tone shifts and allows for something more hopeful. In the description of the river (“How good this water was” (79)) and the narrator upon entering the river (“And how beautiful I became” (80)), Kincaid posits the river and the narrator’s discovery as something benevolent, in stark contrast to her earlier established tone of despair. In the conclusion, as the narrator enters the room with the lamp, the tone still has hints of the earlier despair as the narrator considers her position: “I see these things in the light of the lamp, all perishable and transient, how bound up I know I am to all that is human endeavor, to all that is past and to all that shall be, to all that shall be lost and leave no trace” (82). Despite this, she now has the knowledge to accept this for what it is and, ultimately, overcome it. This ends the text with a tone of hope and encouragement as the narrator she “feel[s herself] grow solid and complete” in the discovery of her identity and purpose (82).
Conflict
In the story, there are two internal conflicts, or struggles within characters: The man with himself and the narrator with herself. In both of these conflicts, the characters struggle with the idea that death is inevitable, and no matter what they do or accomplish, they will eventually die and be lost to time.
For the father, this conflict is something that he faces as he sees his accomplishments—his family, the home he built, and the food he continues to provide. He feels trapped between the happiness this provides and the ultimate death he will face. Rather than address this conflict or grapple with this idea, the man instead chooses to ignore it. The lack of resolution to this conflict is represented in his ongoing preoccupation with this idea; he never moves beyond it. The narrator, having seen what her father went through, decides to face this internal struggle directly in an effort to overcome it. She first grapples with the idea that death is just “natural,” as he told her once, stating that things like the sea, birds, and trees are natural, but death is something greater. She contemplates, for example, the idea of a worm being eaten by a bird, but that bird being shot by a boy. In that boy, she recognizes the idea that something can be “gleaned” from death—her ability to outlive herself and have an impact on the world through her writing. As she enters the river and makes this transition, the narrator overcomes this internal struggle and establishes her new identity as a writer who will impact the world.
Allusion
An allusion is a reference to a person, place, thing, or work of art that exists externally to the story that the reader is expected to recognize. In this story, Kincaid alludes to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his work Republic.
Plato’s Cave tells the story of men who have lived their lives stuck in a cave. They see shadows cast on the wall in front of them by the fire while failing to see the actual objects themselves casting the shadows. Because of their limited perspective, they believe the shadows are reality, never knowing the truth of the world. Plato explains that when someone becomes enlightened by philosophy, science, mathematics, or some other form of higher knowledge, they free themselves from the cave and recognize what is real in the world, rather than just seeing the shadows cast by that reality.
In “At the Bottom of the River,” the narrator enters the river and experiences this enlightenment and discovery. Her father lived his reality, as did she for the first part of the text, as the people in Plato’s Cave did—experiencing the world around them but failing to grasp the greater picture and ideas around them. Upon her entrance into the river, the narrator notes that she “moved through deep caverns, but they were without darkness” (79). This sentence itself is a direct allusion to Plato’s Cave, the light she has discovered has filled the caverns and left everything without darkness, truly allowing her to see. After her experience of the light and knowledge within, the narrator is born anew with a greater understanding of the world and death, just as the philosophers are in Plato’s allegory.
Repetition
Repetition occurs when an author intentionally repeats the same phrase multiple times in the same section of a text. One example of this in the story is Kincaid’s repetition of the phrase “he cannot conceive” (63-64).
At the beginning of the text, a man is described as he sits alone in his room, “waiting and waiting and waiting”; however, he is “not yet complete, so he cannot conceive of what it is he waits for” (63). It is unclear whether this man is the same man who is described in the next sections; nevertheless, they are both incomplete in their understanding of the world and are simply “waiting” for death as they live their lives. The man “cannot conceive” many things in this section, all of which are ideas that go beyond normal observation and require deeper thought and analysis. For example, Kincaid writes that “he cannot conceive of flocks of birds in migratory flight, or that night will follow day and season follow season in a seemingly endless cycle, and the beauty and the pleasure and the purpose that might come from all this” (63). The first part—migratory birds, day, night, seasons —are all things that can be easily seen and understood on a surface level. However, the second part—beauty, pleasure, and purpose—complicates these things; the man can see that they happen but doesn’t understand why. This preoccupation affects their beauty and pleasure. Similarly, “he cannot conceive of the wind that ravages the coastline, casting asunder men and cargo, temporarily interrupting the smooth flow of commerce” (63). Again, the first part—strong wind—is easily felt and therefore understood; however, the implications of that wind, death, and disruption require deeper thought.
This pattern continues with each repetition of the phrase “he cannot conceive” (63): fields and wheat versus the joy felt from their bursting; everyday tasks versus the acknowledgment of their bigger place in the world; Sunday church versus “unearthly glory,” and more. This reveals that the man exists yet fails to truly grasp the world within which he exists. This repetition stresses his position in the world—he “sits in nothing, in nothing, in nothing” (64)—to ultimately contrast it with what the narrator experiences later in the text and the transformation she undergoes.
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