Abstract
Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend opens with a prologue that sets a particularly gothic tone from the first sentence: “[F]or the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it.”1 The sentence seems particularly overwrought for an opening to the novel, subtly forging a claustrophobic atmosphere from the start. Learning of the son’s death, too, immediately haunts the narrative and indicates the gothic mode that will permeate the whole book. Tartt’s prologue then goes on to describe the runup to the evening’s dinner (and Robin’s death): a full 12 pages before we find out how he dies. I want to briefly analyze the prologue as a way of beginning this chapter and debate on the Southern gothic.
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Notes
Donna Tartt, The Little Friend (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 3. Quoted in text from here on.
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© 2015 Christopher Lloyd
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Lloyd, C. (2015). What Remains? Sally Mann and the South’s Gothic Memories. In: Rooting Memory, Rooting Place. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499882_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499882_4
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