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Biggie
The narrator of “Aquifer” is a schoolteacher living in Angelus, originally from a working-class suburb of Perth. Driven by a news report to return to the suburb, the narrator possesses a remarkable memory and deep concern for the past, recalling his childhood in minute detail. While the narrator reveals very little about his placid, middle-class present-day life, he describes his childhood home and lifestyle in great detail, recalling his friends the Box children, his bully Alan Mannering, and other neighborhood characters. The narrator possesses a great secret, which he never reveals: he was the sole witness to Alan Mannering’s drowning. This fateful event prompts the narrator’s obsession with water systems, as he ruminates on Alan’s presence in the aquifer and the invisible threads that tie people and nature together. Closely related to this is the narrator’s concern for time; as a boy, he compulsively used the payphone near his house to get the exact time. In adulthood, he muses at length about how, despite great changes that he and his childhood neighborhood have both undergone, the past stays relevant in continuously unexpected ways.
The Narrator of “Aquifer” Quotes in The Turning
The The Turning quotes below are all either spoken by The Narrator of “Aquifer” or refer to The Narrator of “Aquifer”. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Aquifer
Quotes
From one summer to the next water restrictions grew more drastic and people in our neighborhood began to sink bores to get water. The Englishman next door was the first and then everyone drilled and I thought of Alan Mannering raining silently down upon the lawns of our street. I thought of him in lettuce and tomatoes, on our roses. Like blood and bone. I considered him bearing mosquito larvae – even being in mosquito larvae.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
I was right to doubt the 1194 man on the telephone. Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it. Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognized from the old days, just confirmed what I’ve thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.
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The Narrator of “Aquifer” Quotes in The Turning
The The Turning quotes below are all either spoken by The Narrator of “Aquifer” or refer to The Narrator of “Aquifer”. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Aquifer
Quotes
From one summer to the next water restrictions grew more drastic and people in our neighborhood began to sink bores to get water. The Englishman next door was the first and then everyone drilled and I thought of Alan Mannering raining silently down upon the lawns of our street. I thought of him in lettuce and tomatoes, on our roses. Like blood and bone. I considered him bearing mosquito larvae – even being in mosquito larvae.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
I was right to doubt the 1194 man on the telephone. Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it. Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognized from the old days, just confirmed what I’ve thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.
