The River We Remember

Krueger brackets the narrative with a prologue and an epilogue that detail the importance of the Alabaster River both to the plot and the thematic structure of his story. Although the river, as the site of discovery for Jimmy Quinn’s body, is a crucial part of the novel’s inciting incident, the epilogue clarifies its role within the larger project of the novel and its titular meaning. Krueger employs a third-person omniscient narrative voice, and through it, he clarifies that the river symbolizes the murky nature of what an individual perceives as “truth.” Krueger notes that the many disparate human lives that make up one community merge into a kind of river: “Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about the past” (417). This means that when multiple individuals remember the same place or series of events, there are bound to be discrepancies. Everyone remembers their own particular version of a story. This is evident in the disparate ways that Krueger’s characters think about the river itself, which Krueger enumerates in the epilogue: For Brody, the river symbolizes his clandestine love for his brother’s wife Garnet.