The Leap

The unnamed narrator of “The Leap” is a complex character and a lightly unreliable narrator as a result of her anxieties about daughterhood. She has come home from what she calls a “failed life” out West to care for her aging mother, who is blind and, after the death of the narrator’s father, lacks anyone else to read to her. The narrator’s assessment of her own life as a failure is possibly influenced by her idealization of the Avalon period of her mother’s life, as symbolized by the name Avalon and its mythic associations.

The narrator feels she owes her existence to her mother three times. Two of these events—Anna Avalon’s survival of the Flying Avalons disaster and her courtship with the narrator’s father—occur before the narrator was born. That the narrator nevertheless considers them part of her story reflects an “egocentrism” to which she at times freely admits, as when she describes her deceased half-sister as a “less finished version” of herself (Paragraph 11). Merging her life with this sister’s allows the narrator to claim a connection to Anna’s past in the circus and her more romantic and dazzling days with Harry Avalon.