First-Person Fiction

All Aunt Hagar’s Children gives a brilliant portrayal of how a person’s past can majorly influence their mental health and understanding of the world around them. You can see this sort of subjective mental weight in our main character, a Korean war veteran who had just returned home from deployment.
We first see this character passed out drunk on a sidewalk in D.C after a long night at a bar. It is at this moment we learn about the main plot line. the returning man must search and find his cousin’s killer. In order to achieve this the narrator decides to take a journey to Alaska. It’s on this journey that we see how much the narrator’s own mental guilt affects his everyday life. You see him obsess multiple times over the words of a dying woman he didn’t save and the ending if his toxic past relationship. It seems his past experiences haunt him and he has found himself unable to properly deal with them. In essence, he can’t cope. He can’t move on from this guilt of leaving this white woman dead in the road or the guilt of his leaving his ex. He has so much unresolved trama he just can’t seem get rid of. You can see this struggle manifest in his frustration. His unwillingness to fully help find his cousin. His lack of perseverance to get to Alaska. All of these complex mental decisions and reactions can be tracked to his deteriorating mental health. Even in the end, the only answer to his frustrations we are given is his ex ghosting past him. He is so bogged down with his own frustrations and baggage that he forgot to include other people’s viewpoints. By doing this he completely disregarded his ex’s own feelings and made an assumption that his ex would miss him or be angry. He used a version of transference to displace his own emotions about himself onto her.
Our narrator is constantly ignoring other people’s emotions and focusing on his own. Through this he makes no progress towards coping or growing in his mindset. He sits, stuck in his emotions and allows this attitude to bleed into his feelings towards other people.