The narrator’s sisters Character Analysis

Always referred to as a group, the narrator’s sisters all follow a remarkably similar life path, and the narrator watches their lives with fascination. Red-haired and beautiful, they help their mother around the house when they’re young. After they hit puberty, however, they discover their father’s collection of paperback books and begin to disdain traditional housework, to the disappointment of their mother. As they read and have long talks with their father about the books, they all decide to work at an American-owned seafood restaurant in town that caters to tourists. During the summers where they work these jobs, they meet young men who are rich and sophisticated in ways that their parents will never be. Eventually, they leave town to marry these men—despite the fact that their mother disapproves of them—and move to distant, cosmopolitan cities like Boston, Montreal, and New York. They continue to send their father gifts of books and their mother pictures of their children, which their mother refuses to look at. The fate of the sisters in the story is a bit of a paradox: they form a new tradition out of breaking old traditions. Ultimately, they represent the inevitability of change, showing how a whole generation can become wealthier and better educated than the one before it, at the cost of losing the old traditions.