59 pages • 1 hour read
Annie John
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Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Figures in the Distance”
At age 10, Annie John believes that only people she does not know can die. In the summer, she feeds her family’s ducks and pig, and from her yard, she watches funerals at the cemetery down the street. She doesn’t realize that children can die until she sees a funeral for a child. She fears the dead, as does everyone with whom she interacts, because one never knows when the dead might “show up” again. Annie believes that if one of them follows a living person, the dead won’t give up until the living person dies, too; her mother knows several people who died this way.
One day, Nalda, who is younger than Annie, dies in Annie’s mother’s arms. Annie didn’t know Nalda well, but she knows the girl liked to eat mud and died of a fever. Nalda’s mother is inconsolable, so Annie’s mother prepares Nalda’s body for burial. Knowing that her mother’s hands have stroked and bathed the dead girl, Annie comes to view her mother’s hands negatively, and for a long time, she refuses to allow her mother to touch either her or her food.
Annie says that she loves a schoolmate named Sonia and that this is why she torments the girl. Sonia is older than Annie, and although Annie’s friends dislike Sonia, Annie thinks she’s beautiful. Annie steals money from her mother’s purse to buy Sonia frozen treats at lunchtime. As Sonia eats, Annie pinches and pulls the hair all over Sonia’s body, gently and then hard, making Sonia cry. When Sonia’s mother dies, Annie avoids Sonia because she thinks it is shameful that Sonia’s mother would die and leave the girl alone.
Out of curiosity, Annie begins to attend funerals, unbeknownst to her parents. She can’t tell whether the corpses look different from how they looked in life because they are strangers to her. However, one day, an acquaintance who is the same age as Annie dies. After school, Annie runs to the funeral home and sees the body, noting that the girl looks essentially the same but not as though she were asleep, as adults like to say about dead people.
When Annie arrives home, her mother asks for the fish she was supposed to pick up. Annie completely forgot, but she lies to her mother, saying that the fishermen did not go to sea that day. She doesn’t know that while she was at the funeral, the fisherman got tired of waiting for her, so he brought the fish to her house. Her mother shows her the three fish. That night, as punishment, Annie must eat her dinner alone outside under the breadfruit tree, and her mother vows not to kiss Annie good night. However, when bedtime comes, she kisses Annie anyway.
Chapter 1 Analysis
As the narrator, Annie describes her childhood in retrospect. Because an older, more mature version of Annie is telling the story, her narration adds far more nuance than a child’s perspective would be able to apply. She has had time to reflect on her early experiences, and so the narrative is less intense than it would be if told in the present tense. This emotional distance allows Annie to be a more reliable narrator than she would have been at age 10. The Annie who narrates knows how the story ends, and this knowledge shapes the contemplative nature of the story itself.
The first chapter is short, especially in comparison to the next, likely because Annie’s life is relatively simple in her youth, but it does serve the vital purpose of establishing Annie’s deep attachment to her mother. Her mother is her whole world because they do almost everything together. Though Annie lies about the fisherman, her mother forgives her easily and still gives her the kiss she promised to withhold. Annie’s only problems arise whenever she experiences a disconnect from her mother, such as when her mother tends to Nalda after the girl dies. As an only child, Annie has never had to share her mother’s attention, and when the dead Nalda seems to compete for it, Annie fixates on her mother’s hands, viewing them as somehow tainted. Because one’s relationship with one’s mother is the most important relationship Annie can imagine, she abandons Sonia when the girl loses her own mother. To Annie, Sonia has become “a shameful thing” because she is “alone in the world” (8). Annie’s mother is the reason she does not feel alone in the world, signifying how relatively unimportant every other relationship is to her at this stage in her life. The depth of this early connection between mother and daughter also lays the groundwork for the theme of Misinterpreted Parental Love that will dominate the chapters detailing Annie’s rebellious tendencies.
The breadfruit tree under which Annie must eat her dinner alone symbolizes abundance and nourishment as well as humans’ potential for growth. Putting Annie under the breadfruit tree is appropriate because it will symbolically help her to realize her mistake and grow from it. At age 10, Annie’s lessons are simple. For example, her mother’s punishment for the incident with the fish is meant to teach the girl not to lie. However, the three fish are also symbolic of how Annie’s mother functions within her family. She buys one of her husband’s favorite fish, one of her own, and one of Annie’s, and her own fish is placed between the other two, just as her husband and young daughter receive equal attention from her.
Annie’s community holds many superstitions that influence her family’s concept of death. The belief that dead people can reappear after death to claim the lives of the living drives Annie’s fear and her mother’s and influences the protective approach that Annie’ mother takes to parenting. This dynamic compounds Annie’s uncertainty about her safety in the world, and her mother’s knowledge of people who have died in this manner represents yet another way in which her mother seems to be an expert in all things, living and dead.
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