The narrator is the novel’s unnamed protagonist. He addresses the audience in a first-person narrative that is often contradictory and occasionally blurs the timeline of the novel. One of the narrator’s primary character traits is his apathy, which can be traced to a number of traumatic experiences and losses in his early life. He describes this feeling as “distance” and explains his lack of feeling in Chapter 1:

For that matter, none of them counted; not one meant anything to me. And for no reason. I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years. . . But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon. And that was why I had no particular feelings toward my mother and grandmother. Or the girl who had come to live with me” (2).

This emotional distance can be traced to the death of Mose, the narrator’s brother, who was one of the only two people the narrator acknowledges having loved. The other was First Raise, the narrator’s father.