Jamaica Kincaid's Girl

Throughout the short story “Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid tells a story about a mother giving her daughter advice about growing up through a series of semicolons and run on sentences within a single paragraph. This technique Kincaid uses through the course of her short story is quite an unusual approach to the reader at first. Usually, short stories consist of completely structured sentences and multiple paragraphs. Although Kincaid’s structure in “Girl” is constructed in an untraditional manner, it plays an important role in describing a mother’s responsibility of teaching their daughter life lessons essential to adulthood as a woman. The advice the mother gives her daughter is quite abundant and clearly wasn’t taught in a single session, but