This fact makes Irene’s ultimate survival even more damning. Irene is a rare thing in fiction—a black woman who is allowed to feel jealousy, rage, anger, resentment, sexual desire, and still, she’s still alive at the end of the novel, allowed to fully feel her own ambivalence and torment. Irene is a realization of fiction’s promise—that through a novel, one can enter a consciousness completely different from one’s own, full of knots and complexity.
