Voyage In The Dark Sparknotes

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Jean Rhys portrayed a similar message in Voyage in the Dark. Anna, the main character, is faced with the ultimate identity crisis throughout the novel. Having been born in a colony to an interracial couple, Anna’s childhood was full of misinformation and judgment by those closest to her. She was shunned by the white community around her, and was never going to be apart of the colored community no matter how badly she wanted to be. Anna did not fit into the colonizer’s status quo since she came from a mixed background, and when she would try and connect to the colored people around her, she was told that she could never understand their culture because she was “privileged”. This dynamic set the rest of the plot of Anna’s life in England. Being …show more content…

As much as she wants to be a part of either world, Anna is segregated from their castes, thereby eliminating any social power and truth that she may have been able to obtain if her identity was clear to her and accepted by the rest. Anna recalls someone saying, “you cant expect niggers to behave like white people all the time Uncle Bo said its asking too much of human nature” (Rhys …show more content…

During this flashback, Anna understands where she belongs in society, the truth of her existence. She says, “you look at everything and you don’t see it only sometimes you see it like now I see—a cold moon looking down on a place where nobody is a place full of stones where nobody is” (Rhys 187). Anna comes to the consensus that she is alone in this world. The reader can observe that the end of this book sounds more like the beginning of a book and vice versa. If one ignores the fact that Anna dies in the original version, the novel follows a cyclical pattern. Even though Anna gets the abortion, she will still end up in the marginalized part of society and inevitably, alone. Anna is powerless when it comes to which path she takes. It is a common belief that a person sets their own path in life and it is the decisions he or she make that can alter it. Yet, when looking at Anna’s situation, she had no choice but to end up in the unfortunate place she is at the end of the novel. She was dismissed by the two parts of the society back in Dominica when she was a child, and when she moved to England, she not only had no racial identity, she also did not belong to a specific class. This caused her to make questionable life choices, such as her occupation(s), that were forced

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