Young girl Character Analysis

“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”

“Father-born,” [the girl] says—”It is a word I have never heard before.”

I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

“But since we speak of childbearing, has the time not come to tell me the truth about your own child, the lost daughter and Bahia? Did you truly give birth to her? Is she substantial or is she a story too?”

“I will answer, but not before you have told me: the girl you send who calls herself by my name, is she substantial? You touch her; you embrace her; you kiss her. Would you dare to say she’s not substantial? No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you two are substantial, no less and no more than any of us. We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world.”

“You have omitted Friday.”

“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”

“Father-born,” [the girl] says—”It is a word I have never heard before.”

I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

“But since we speak of childbearing, has the time not come to tell me the truth about your own child, the lost daughter and Bahia? Did you truly give birth to her? Is she substantial or is she a story too?”

“I will answer, but not before you have told me: the girl you send who calls herself by my name, is she substantial? You touch her; you embrace her; you kiss her. Would you dare to say she’s not substantial? No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you two are substantial, no less and no more than any of us. We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world.”

“You have omitted Friday.”