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This interesting back-and-forth dance jumbles time and perspective, keeps us in suspense, as we gain access to the rich and layered characters, bit by bit. He is racked with guilt over making his daughter dead instead, and this contrition softens him and makes him more human.Īs readers, we get all of this information either from Miri or from the omniscient third person narrator.
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As readers, we watch as this strong man goes from being Miri’s hero to being a stranger whose sacrifice costs his youngest child everything-whose “impossible choice …killed all love.” In the after, Sebastian knows that his daughter sees him as “a man who could not love enough to save her when there was still something of her left to save,” and this knowledge slowly eats away at him. We also follow Michael Jameson, Miri’s other half, as he goes on a personal journey from determined courter, to faithful life partner and father, to irate husband who will stop at nothing to get his wife back, to meek and terrified man who doesn’t know if he has the strength to put the pieces back together, to supportive lover who chooses his wife always-“today, yesterday, tomorrow”-the kind of man who will be her rock through the “for worse.”įinally, there is Miri’s dad Sebastien Duval-a Haitian success story-a self-made man: calm, rational, determined, demanding, serious, disapproving, controlling and in control, hardheaded, obstinate, and ruthless. Her doing so allows the reader to enter each character’s psyche and also gives her the opportunity to shine a spotlight on the book’s primary setting, Haiti-a land of contradictions-which, in addition to being beautiful and ugly, familiar and unknowable, filthy and a jewel, is the birthplace of Gay’s own parents.Īs readers, we trace Miri’s evolution-a transition Gay meticulously crafts-from headstrong, willful, independent law student and abiding daughter-whole on her own-to a woman who needs her husband to feel whole, who is “inconsolable without him,”to a captive who “need something to fill the gnawing hollow inside”of her, to an entirely un-whole shell, so empty that she can’t bear the thought of anything inside of her, be it food or her husband. Gay writes the story in an interesting way, playing with point of view as she switches back and forth from first person narration-Miri’s perspective-to third person omniscient narration. The drama is in the thirteen days of captivity, filled with hunger and brutality and rape and abuse, but also in the aftermath, when she devolves, curling into herself, before she can eventually make sense of her trauma and regain some semblance of a life. The book is set up in “the before,” when protagonist Miri has a husband and a baby and a career and confidence and spunk, versus “the after,”when she has nothing because she is nothing-her sense of self, her belief in happily ever after, her notion of her perfect father all die with her in the cage where, for nearly two weeks, she is held. These motifs are at the heart of the narrative they are the real story. Using literary devices like point of view and figurative language, Gay brings the motifs of survival and resiliency to light through Miri’s struggle. The problem is, there is no getting her back-at least not the way she was-and it is she, not her father, who pays the real price. Prolific writer of primarily creative nonfiction, Roxane Gay tackles fiction in her debut novel An Untamed State, about a Haitian-American woman, Mireille (Miri) Duval Jameson, who is kidnapped for ransom and brutalized for thirteen days as her diplomat father struggles to get her back at a fair price.