Mr. Potter, by Jamaica Kincaid

1027 Words3 Pages

“And it was the middle of the night when there was no wind and there had been no rain for a long time…” (Kincaid 4.61) Mr. Potter’s life begins in stark contrast to the opening of the book. When demonstrating Mr. Potter’s routine life, Jamaica Kincaid portrays “the sun…in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky…” (Kincaid 1.3) but she chose a very different setting for Mr. Potter’s birth. Instead of being born into a sun so bright it made “even the shadows pale” (Kincaid 1.3), Mr. Potter was born into darkness. This darkness, in fact, marked the beginning of his life and continued until his mother walked into the sea. “The water was thick and blank (it was a form of darkness)” (Kincaid 4.71). Although the book incorporates many repetitions of the line about the sun being in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky, this chapter emerges in darkness.
After illustrating the setting of Mr. Potter’s birth, Jamaica Kincaid characterizes the relationship between mother and child. “…his head next to her gently beating heart, her breathing so regular, so calm, so perfect, as if she had been made that way by God himself” (Kincaid 4.68). This perfection of Roderick Potter and Elfrida Robinson sleeping next to each other lasted a only a few days before “Elfrida…grew tired of him, lying next to her, feeding from her, and then sleeping next to her, and how she longed to be rid of him” (Kincaid 4.69). Once Elfrida saw Roderick as a burden, she abandoned him to the Shepherds and “walked into the sea.”
The third part of Chapter Four is when Elfrida “…walked into the sea without even so much as despair, she did not have even so much as a sense of hopeless and then going beyond that, she was made up only of what lay b...

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...also separated from Dr. Weizenger in Chapter One. The two saw each other as completely different people and Dr. Weizenger only saw Mr. Potter as ignorant because he could not read.
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (Aristotle). Broken down, chapter by chapter and piece by piece, Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter tells many different stories about a man who curses God, a little girl asking her estranged father for money to buy school supplies, a woman stealing the life savings from a man she loves, and many more. As a whole, however, the book not only illustrates the author’s search to understand her father’s life, but also conveys the idea of a world without love. When viewed as a part of the entire book, Chapter Four refines this theme through Mr. Potter’s relationship with his mother and her abandonment of him.

Works Cited

Kincaid, J. Mr Potter (2002)

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