By leaving so much information unstated, by threading a pattern of ellipses throughout the stories, Cornell distills the individual grief and bereavement attendant to a death or departure. Cornell relies on two modes of narration. In The Start of the Season, Stigmata, Outtake and Punching In, the reader is in the hands of a conventional third person narrator who concentrates on the consciousness of one character. The other eight stories in the collection are delivered by distinct first person narrators, each of them daughters. Heat, Hydrophobic, Departures, Touched, Rise and The Swing of Things are narrated by motherless daughters.
Inheritance is narrated by a daughter whose parents have been long separated.
Only once, in Undertow, is the reader addressed by a daughter who is a member of a complete family unit for the duration of the tale. For the purposes of this discussion, I will utilize all of the stories but will, of course, concentrate more intensively on selections most representative of Cornell s elliptical and gnomonic motif. Consequently, we will see what is missing and what is left in greater Belfast as depicted by Jennifer C. Cornell. Cornell s stories are similarly, but not exactly, this kind of a relief and a surprise to me. Belfast emerges as an entity more essential than backdrop, but it never takes on the role of protagonist.