Bunny

Samantha Heather Mackey is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. The story comes from her perspective, and the reader is supposed to root for her. She’s an outsider and something of an underdog. She comes from a working-class town, Falling, with hardship and setbacks built into its name. Her mom worked in a hair salon, and her dad worked at a haunted house before he got briefly rich from real estate schemes. Her parents are static characters—they don’t change. Her mom is dead, and her dad is absent. They exist in her head and add to the theme of Constant Voices. She hears phone conversations with her dad and interactions with her mom. Through her parents, Samantha spotlights her past and creates the novel’s bildungsroman aspects. The reader can see how adulthood has and hasn’t changed her.

Although Samantha is a 25-year-old woman, she sometimes acts like a teen or a child. Sitting with the Rob Valencia that the Bunnies created, Samantha confesses, “I have forgotten that I am a twenty-five-year-old woman. The heart Rob Valencia holds in his hand is a seventeen-year-old heart” (90). The Bunnies pull Samantha into a teen, sophomoric world.