At the Bottom of the River

“Not for him can thought crash over though in random and violent succession, leaving his brain suffused in contradiction.”

This description of the man from the beginning of the text serves two purposes. First, it shows his inability to comprehend the idea of multiple layers of thought and ideas at war with each other. Instead, he puts these thoughts aside in favor of the more concrete ideas of family, shelter, and survival. Additionally, the imagery within this quote—of ideas crashing violently—shows the value of contradiction. Everything does not need to be clearly defined or explained as humanity tries to do; rather, it is enough to grapple with ideas and appreciate contradictions, even if neat conclusions cannot be drawn from them.

“What is the virtue in him? And then again, what can it matter? For tomorrow the oak will be felled, the trestle will break, the cow’s hooves will be made into glue.”

This line represents the internal conflict with which both the man and the narrator struggle. For many, virtue is important, but here, it is simply discarded and viewed as something irrelevant with death coming for everything. At the same time, the destroyed images here allude to humanity’s involvement; felling is chopping down a tree, a trestle is a humanmade object, and someone had to kill a cow and boil its hooves to make glue. This hints that preoccupation with death is also a human construct.

“But so he stands, forever, crossing and recrossing the threshold, his head lifted up, held aloft and stiff with vanity; then his eyes shift and he sees and he sees, and he is weighed down.”

This threshold symbolizes the man as he is torn between two worlds: one in which he is happy and content with the life he has built, and the other in which death is inevitable and will put an end to everything. He looks into his home and sees what he has built, but then he looks outward to the world, which is larger but surrounded by death nonetheless. This man’s inability to escape the symbolic “threshold” of his simple understanding of life contrasts directly with the understanding the narrator discovers upon entering the river.

“His child crossing the street, joining the throng of children on their way to school, a mixture of broken sentences, mispronounced words, laughter, budding malice, and energy abundant.”

The juxtaposition in this sentence—between the laughter of the children and the “budding malice”—emphasizes the journey that they will take along with the rest of humanity. They begin innocent and playful, unable to appropriately speak but appreciating the joy in life, and eventually learn malice and anger as they are, presumably, faced with death.

“‘Sing again. Sing now,’ he says in his heart, for he feels the cool breeze at the back of his neck.”

The man forces himself to “sing” and be cheerful despite the futility he sees all around him. This “cool breeze” metaphorically represents death, always waiting for him and undeniably coming for him, regardless of what he accomplishes in life or how content he feels.

“Is life, then, a violent burst of light, like flint struck sharply in the dark?”

This simile, a comparison of a burst of light that comes from striking flint to life itself, shows one possible view the narrator has of life, phrased as a question as she contemplates this idea. Given the vast size of the world and everything that it contains, it’s possible that one life is strong yet brief, as a “burst of light” is. The use of a rhetorical question here emphasizes the impossibility of comprehending life’s purpose.

“All around the house was a wide stretch of green—green grass freshly mowed and uniform in length. The green, green grass of uniform length extended from the house for a distance I could not measure or know just from looking at it.”

This description of the house at the bottom of the river, as the narrator first sees it, conveys an otherworldly nature and lends symbolic importance to the house and the setting. The grass is perfectly green, mowed, and uniform while also at the bottom of the river, conveying the idea that this house exists outside the reader’s understanding of the world.

“I could see her feet, and I saw that her insteps were high, as if she had been used to climbing high mountains.”

This description of the woman who comes to the door of the house, specifically of her feet, references the description of the river from the beginning of the story: “The steepest mountains, thickly covered, where huge, sharp rocks might pose the greatest danger and where only the bravest, surest, most deeply arched of human feet will venture” (62). At that point in the story, it was made clear that the river’s path would go untouched by humanity. However, by describing the woman’s feet and high insteps, the connection can be made that she is not a typical human. She has ventured where most of humanity has not, making her importance clear and implying that she has a knowledge and understanding greater than humanity’s.

“They appeared in a way I had never seen before: The Sun, a creation of Benevolence and Purpose and not a star among many stars, with a predictable cycle and a predictable end; the moon, too, was The Moon, and it was the creation of Beauty and Purpose and not a body subject to a theory of planetary evolution.”

As the narrator describes how she sees the sun and the moon in the river, capitalization lends the ideas of the Sun and the Moon more power, importance, and singularity. She attributes “Purpose” to both celestial bodies to make their importance to humanity and the greater world clear while also striking down the idea that they are part of a “predictable cycle” and just a “body subject to a theory.” Cycles and theories are human inventions, explained by science, but the moon and sun’s presence in the river and being described this way rejects the idea that they can be explained away by science. They serve a much greater role.

“And they lived in this world not yet divided, not yet examined, not yet numbered, and not yet dead.”

“They,” as described here, are the creatures and formations that exist at the bottom of the river. Kincaid’s repetition of the phrase “not yet” strengthens the idea that these things are all in existence outside of the world as we understand it and are thus untouched by humanity’s methods of quantifying and qualifying things. They are not subject to the ideas of dividing, examining, numbering, or even dying, and are thus outside the realm of human intervention and invention.

“It was as warm as freshly spilled blood.”

This simile, used to compare the water in the river to the warmth of “freshly spilled blood,” makes it clear that the water does still exist in a world full of death and violence.

“My feet, my hands, my head, my heart—having once been there, were now stripped away, as if I had been dipped again and again, over and over, in a large vat filled with some precious elements.”

This quote shows the importance of what the narrator undergoes at the bottom of the river. She has been stripped of all her physical features and will now be reborn as something new with a deeper understanding of the world. Additionally, it is an allusion to Achilles and the River Styx. Thetis, Achilles’s mother, took her son and dipped him into the River Styx to make him immortal, but he retains mortality at the back of his heel where his mother held him. Similarly, in undergoing her rebirth in the water, the narrator becomes “immortal” through her writing and its impact on humanity, though she cannot escape death entirely.

“I ask, When shall I, too, be extinguished so that I cannot be recognized even from my bones? I covet the rocks and the mountains their silence. And so, emerging from my pit, the one I sealed up securely, the one to which I have consigned all my deeds that I care not to reveal.”

Although little explored in the text, this line and the narrator’s “coveting” of the silence of the rocks and mountains implies that she has already begun to feel the weight of the task she now must take on upon exiting the river. She could choose to ignore her newfound identity and sense of purpose, but instead, she feels compelled to use her knowledge, experience, and writing ability to speak out, even if at a cost to herself. In turn, she “seal[s] up” parts of herself that she wishes to keep hidden from the world as she consciously decides to reveal the bulk of herself through her writing for the benefit of humanity.