The use of different tenses to describe the different phases of Lore’s life, as intertwined in Slow River, is clearly open to interpretation. To the degree that the last phase, chronologically, is the one in which first person is used, one might say that Lore simply identifies most with her current incarnation, and that the tale told from ten years further on would invoke the first person only for events later still. However, it seems possible that the use of third person reflects Lore’s conscious dissociation from herself as she existed before the advent of Sal Bird the second. One delineated difference between Lore in the different timelines is her relationship with morality. The Lore of the first sequence (until the kidnapping), seems to have little or no relationship with the construct of morality. She has occasional snatches of empathy, but her code seems to be loyalty to family, and honor of that which is correct or effective. Her actions, while not particularly reprehensible, are never placed in a context of morality, despite the fact that, as she later find out, they may be associated with any level of damage to many people.
By contrast, although her actions with Spanner are harmful on a much smaller scale, Lore seems to feel a constant need to justify herself, or at least a growing concern that she doesn’t feel guilty. This shift may be a result of greater maturity. It can also be related to a tension between Lore’s actions, which she sometimes conceptualizes as part of a façade, and her attempts to maintain some sort of separate core self. Her relationship with morality in this phase seems mostly to consist of feeling guilty for not feeling guilty about what she does to the people around her, most notably Ruth and Ellen. In the first phase, Lore is entrenched in a place where everyone she knows is functionally above any law that happens to exist around them. By extension, they seem to avoid any association, positive or negative, with ethics. The lawsuit in Caracas is handled in a manner calculated to discourage further lawsuits, with no consultation with the concept of moral obligation. She and her family are much like demi-g’ds. In the second phase, she’s descended to the level of mere mortals, and thus must abide by their laws, constitutional and moral, or risk suffering the consequences.
In the third phase, Lore’s present, she seems to develop a sense of ethics broader than herself, and rooted on some level a sense of obligation to other people. She ends up risking exposure or unemployment and a potential return to crime in order to do her job right, and protect the people she works with, as well as the people who drink the water she processes. She describes her concerns for others as felt, rather than regretted or missed. From her new perspective, with something of an active moral compass, it makes sense that she would want to dissociate herself from her prior bad acts, and the mindsets that went with them. She needs to intergrate her experiences in order to process them, and to put herself together, but she’s still trying to escape her past lives, and so she dissociates.