A Summary and Analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘The Letter from Home’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

It takes particular skill to write a short story that is also one long sentence. But Jamaica Kincaid (born 1949) has proved herself to be especially adept at it. ‘The Letter from Home’ – originally published in the New Yorker in April 1981 – is one such example of the single-sentence short story which appears straightforward and even banal on the surface, but which conceals something more metaphysical and troubling underneath.

The story takes the form of a letter a mother has written to her daughter, who has moved away from ‘home’ (presumably the Caribbean) to new shores (possibly the United States). However, the daughter’s voice merges with the mother’s, producing a headlong, dizzying, ambiguous read.

Summary

The first-person narrator of ‘The Letter from Home’ outlines everything she has done. The story is usually interpreted by critics as a letter written by a mother to her daughter, who has left home and is now living abroad. However, the story also appears to incorporate the ‘voice’ of the daughter receiving the letter while living in another country.

The difference between the two women’s homelands is subtly pointed up by minor details: one moment, we are in the world of snow, fridges, and cars; the next, we are being told of a boat sailing across water and the lighting of candles, suggesting a less technologically advanced world.

The story’s one-sentence list – almost a litany – begins with the ordinary and everyday chores the mother has undertaken, such as milking the cows, baking bread, washing clothes, and dressing the children. This last detail suggests the narrator is a mother, of course, although ‘the’ children could imply they are someone else’s being looked after by the narrator.

Then, within the first few lines, the focus starts to shift away from the narrator’s tasks to other details: the cat meowing, the dog barking, and the humming of the fridge. The presence of snow on the tree branches suggest that the setting of the story is winter, and somewhere cold; although it is difficult to deduce this, we may also have shifted location – from the world of the mother writing the letter to the world of the daughter receiving it, somewhere cold and very different from the mother’s world.

Then we have a brief section of dialogue, spoken by an unidentified man. It’s possible this section of the story belongs to the world of the daughter, who is looking after the children of a family, as a live-in au pair.

As the story develops, the female narrator begins to ponder bigger questions, using religious and biblical language to frame them: is there a heaven above and a hell below? What happens after death: are we reunited with lost loved ones?

The story ends with the ambiguous image of the narrator having a vision of a man dressed in a shroud, while she sits in a boat. He beckons for her to join him, and she turns and rows away.

Analysis

Alongside the ordinary chores and life events which the narrator of ‘The Letter from Home’ recounts, there are also some curious other details which point to the story’s true meaning: that it is about life as passive as well as active, as a series of happenings, some of which we make happen and some of which simply happen to us.

The narrator even tells us how hard her heart was beating, and how she ‘shed’ her skin, like a snake. Of course, human beings do shed their skin constantly, gradually; it is as if the passing of time is being captured in these brief details. We’ve also moved from details which are humdrum but within the narrator’s control (making tea, baking, and the rest of it) to those for which she lacks any individual agency (shedding skin, heart palpitations, her waist growing fatter with ‘folds’).

This shifting between realism and something approaching magic realism is of a piece with the narrator’s curious ambiguity. Is she the mother of the family, as implied at the beginning, or the daughter, as suggested by the later reference to dutifully chewing her food thirty-two times precisely, as if at the command of a parent?

Or is she a strange hybrid of both? Instead of reading the words of one fixed, homogeneous figure, we find we are being addressed by all woman, an amalgamation of various types of female speaker performing various roles. After all, don’t daughters often grow up to become mothers themselves?

The curious ending to the story leaves us unsure of what the narrator means by her actions (which are themselves ambiguous). She sees a man wearing a ‘shroud’, suggesting Jesus or another messianic figure, presumably waiting for her on the shore as she sits in her rowboat. Is she on the final river, Styx, and making her way to the underworld? Does the end of the story hark back to the narrator’s earlier talk of heaven and hell and whether they exist?

Or is this Christlike figure trying to lead her back to religion, embodied by her mother’s world, the world the daughter has left behind when she moved away from home? Note how she decides to row ‘away’, suggesting that she wishes to reject the shrouded man’s wish that she join him as one of his children.

But ‘I turned and rowed away’ is open to two interpretations. It’s possible she was facing away from him to begin with, and through turning comes to face towards him; she is then rowing away from her new life and back towards God and Christianity. And although she may narrow her eyes when he whistles sweetly to attract her attention, this action is itself poised between suspicion (she doesn’t wish to respond to this siren-call) and a simple desire to focus her eyes more clearly on the figure, to make out who he is.