That's Not My Name

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to murder, violence, kidnapping, self-harm, child abuse, and police harassment.

“Holy shit. It’s so dark”

Madison’s diction—“Holy shit”—is an early piece of foreshadowing that she is not, in fact, Mary Boone. Her instinctive reaction to her situation is to use language that is unlikely to come from a girl raised in Mary’s circumstances. Her emphasis on how very dark her surroundings are contributes to the story’s theme of The Dangers of Isolation.

“Sure enough, it’s me. Same stranger from my reflection […] though my face looks different when it’s not so bruised and swollen.”

Madison’s thoughts about the photo of Mary characterize her as willing to believe the best of others—she attributes the differences between her appearance and Mary’s to her recent injuries, rather than becoming suspicious of Wayne. This foreshadows the trouble she will have putting together later clues that Wayne is deceiving her and supports the text’s thematic claims about Memory’s Role in Identity and The Deceptive Nature of Appearances.

“Life really goes to shit when everyone thinks you killed your girlfriend.”

Drew’s first words in the novel characterize him as having a sardonic sense of humor and a blunt, direct tone that does not spare either his audience or himself. He is complaining both about the frustration of trying to use the library copier and his situation more generally, making a darkly humorous