At the Bottom of the River

Central to “At the Bottom of the River” is the theme of life and death, both concretely and in the more abstract idea of how people should live their lives knowing that death is imminent. In both the man and the narrator, Kincaid portrays internal conflicts that play out in their struggles with their deeds in life and death’s inevitability.

At the start of the text, the reader is introduced to a man who seems content with the things around him. He has a wife and child, a home he has built, food he has provided, and books he has read—by all accounts he should feel accomplished and fulfilled in what he has done. However, he also sees the repetition and ultimately the futility in it all. His preoccupation with whether his actions are meaningful traps him in a cycle of contemplation; the narrator notes that “[h]e sits in nothing, this man: not in a full space, not in emptiness, not in darkness, not in light or glimmer of. He sits in nothing, in nothing, in nothing” (64). The repetition of “nothing” parallels his view that his life is simply a series of routines. This gloomy view of death’s inevitability keeps the man stuck in a state of meaninglessness. This imagery is later juxtaposed with the daughter’s spiritual journey, similarly disembodied but which focuses on light and connection rather than nothingness.

The man’s feelings of death’s inevitability are echoed when the tone shifts and the narration turns to his daughter, the narrator. She reflects upon the idea of death first through a dead branch, on which lay both a dead fly and a beetle. Next, she considers the physical structures of a house and monument and the voices of children, all of which are now gone as well. She writes, “Dead is the past, Dead shall be the future” (69), acknowledging death’s omnipotence. However, unlike her father, she seeks not to ignore or fear death. Rather, she confronts it and gains a deeper understanding of life.

As such, these feelings reproduce but also contrast with the man’s ideas. The man feels weighed down by death and time. He reflects on natural images that convey impermanence: the “shell of the pearly nautilus,” the “memory of a day spent blissfully at the sea,” “pile upon pile of rock […] worn down from the pressure of the great seas,” sulfurous fountains, hot lava, black dust at the bottom of caves, and remnants of invertebrates (66-67). All of these things—objects made by and affected by nature over time—do nothing to satiate the man’s feelings of uncertainty and foreboding at the thought of death. The narrator also sees these things in nature—when she contemplates the creature in her parable or the worm who will inevitably be eaten by the bird—but she also sees the boy who will shoot the bird, as well as herself, and she sees the power of humanity as something that can be “gleaned” from death (72-73). Unlike her father, the narrator acknowledges that our deeds can give purpose to our lives, even after they have ended.

The text, then, explores through these two characters how death will inevitably haunt life, but humanity can acknowledge, accept, and move past this. Kincaid suggests that there is beauty in nature and in the choices we make to accept and transcend death. Ultimately, this can balance out what was initially seen as life’s futility.