The narrator

The narrator’s outer characterization in “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy” by Alice Walker tells us that she is a poor teenage African-American girl, the narration following her from her childhood until the age of 17. She lives only with her mother and never knew her father. Physically, she only mentions how she looked at the age of 14: “I was fourteen, but I guess I looked like a grown woman. Or maybe I looked fourteen.” (ll. 4…

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Inner characterization

The narrator’s inner characterization begins with her childhood and her relationship with her mother. Firstly, the narrator is probably affected by the fact that she never knew her father: “I never knew him. My mother must have loved him, though; she never talked against him when I was little. It was like he never existed.” (ll. 1-3)

Secondly, she begins to feel frustrated when she realizes that they are poor. She enjoys spending time next to the Capitol building because it is so different from the poor, smelly neighborhood she lives in: “…I climbed up in one of them and got a bloom and took it home. But the air in our house blighted it; it turned brown the minute I took it inside and the petals dropped off.” (ll. 13-15)

Thirdly, because her mother is constantly working as a maid, the narrator does not feel close to her, but to the old woman whom her mother leaves her with: “…there was an old woman up the street who looked after me for a while—and by the time she died she was more like a mother to me than Mama was.” (ll. 23-25)

The narrator’s relationship with her mother is developed throughout the whole story. In this way, we find out that the narrator did not understand her mother’s attitude, suspecting she preferred being away from home: “But I didn't understand anything then about exhaustion, worry, lack of a proper diet; I just thought she wanted to work, to be away from the house. I didn't blame her.” (ll. 34-36)

The narrator is raped at the age of 12, but she does not say anything about it to anyone, because rapes were common and she does not think it will solve anything: “It was nothing for a girl or woman to be raped— l was raped myself, when I was twelve, and my …

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