The Narrator In 'Alice' By Paulette White

In the story “Alice” Paulette White develops a narrator whose participation with Alice satisfies the curiosity of the reader. By letting the reader grow with the narrator as she tries to figure out who Alice is. The narrator starts by remembering going “with Mamma… to borrow things” from “[Alice’s] house,” the curious reader begins to consider the impact of this visit. The child-narrator recalls beer, flies rank smelling rooms, and gray sticky floors. However, the narrator ponders her “beauty”- a term used three times. The narrator proceeds Alice as a beautiful bad-woman. At this point, the reader realizes that Alice’s beauty is not because she is “Alice… in a house of dark places”, but because she is a “mother in a house of dark places”. The narrator also recalls Alice’s oldest son wheelchair bound sitting by a sunny window. Where Alice stayed for hours “giving him …show more content…
Its was not till Alice had lost her son and husband, and the narrator was married and have sons of her own. That the two familiar characters “for the first time” sit together. Through the progression of the narrator’s maturity from childhood to motherhood, the narrator discovered that she became so much like Alice, preferring “the taste of beer and how to talk bad-woman talk.” Thus, the narrator makes the reader wonder about the truth of her childhood neighborhood, and the beautiful bad-woman Alice. Surprisingly the narrator realizes that most of Alice’s traits good and bad are now part of the narrator's own adult