I just realized why Octavia Butler wrote Imago in the first person. It is ridiculously hard to write a compelling sentence about Jodahs, when you constantly have to refer to it as "it".
I just realized why Octavia Butler wrote Imago in the first person. It is ridiculously hard to write a compelling sentence about Jodahs, when you constantly have to refer to it as "it".
race, gender, and science fiction is the fall 2007 course website for english 168 at pomona college in claremont, california.
Yeah, I also noticed this. It's interesting that she chooses this as the only book of the three to write in first person, and I think besides the compelling sentence issue, it helps the reader identify with a character we otherwise would have difficulty with because it is not gendered. Also, I thought she did a great job of maintaining the lack of gender--when I finished reading, I realized I never thought of the narrator as either a male or a female. (This could just be me; on the other hand, I usually do find myself gendering first-person narrators even before a gender is identified.)