Structure

The short story “The American Embassy” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a non-chronological structure and jumps back in time, following the main character as she queues in front of the American embassy for a visa interview. 

The story begins in media res and introduces the readers to the main character: 

She stood in line outside the American embassy in Lagos, staring straight ahead, barely moving, a blue plastic file of documents tucked under her arm. She was the forty-eighth person in the line of about two hundred that trailed from the closed gates of the American embassy all the way past the smaller, vine-encrusted gates of the Czech embassy. (p. 80, ll. 1-5)

The beginning of the story also foreshadows the woman’s distress, as she seems detached and uninterested in the things around her: 

She did not notice the newspaper vendors who blew whistles and pushed The Guardian, The news, and Th...

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