Initially, I didn’t like The Time of the Doves. For a while I couldn’t figure out why. I found that some kind of energy was missing from the book. When I made it to page 79, however, I realized why I had found the book unappealing up to that point, and from that moment onward I actually enjoyed it. The specific line on page 79 that piqued my interest was this one: “And my children—I don’t know, because everyone knows how mothers exaggerate, but they were pretty as two flowers.”
This line may seem innocuous at first, but it struck me for a very particular reason: it was one of the first times in the book I could recall where Natalia significantly exhibited some kind of inner life or even agency. She had emotions before this point, of course, and made decisions, but reading this line, where she expresses a bit of self-doubt (“everyone knows how mothers exaggerate”) and contrasts her subjective experience with an objective view of the world, made me realize how little we hear of Natalia’s inner life.
Especially in the book’s early sections, it really seems like things just happen to Natalia, and that she just goes with them. Her marriage to Quimet is a prime example of this. We don’t see much of Natalia struggling internally, trying to figure out whether he is the right man for her, or if she even likes him. The marriage sort of just… happens. At least that’s how it felt to me.
Besides her questioning the validity of her perception of her children’s beauty, there are other moments when Natalia tries to exert influence on the world around her, and solidify her existence as a genuine human being with a genuine inner life. However, these typically result in her being shunned. For instance, on page 22 we encounter the following passage:
He [Quimet] delivered a long sermon about men and women and the rights of one and the rights of the other and when I was able to cut in I asked him:
“What if I just can’t bring myself to like something?”
“You’ve got to like it, because that means it’s something you don’t understand.”
Natalia does not share her deepest inner thoughts and feelings with Quimet often, and we can see why (a lot could be said about this in relation to her second marriage as well, and in relation to how Natalia’s narration style and willingness to express her feelings changes throughout the book, but in order to keep this post short I’ve decided to discuss only her first marriage, and her narration style in roughly the first half of the novel). However, she also doesn’t share them often with us, the reader. This creates the sense that there is “no escape” for Natalia’s inner life and agency: that even as a fictional character speaking through a confessional medium, she cannot express all of the parts of herself.
My question for discussion is: What effect does it have on the reader when a narrator seldom expresses her inner life (as happens particularly in the first half or so of The Time of the Doves)?
Finn McBride 
“This line may seem innocuous at first…” This is a very good observation. The same can be said of several lines in the novel, the meaning of which increases as we progress through the reading. That’s part of the poetic character of certain novels, as far as I can understand. It works like in a poem, where an image or even a word reappears with a broader meaning. I also found your mention of the brief glimpses in which Natalia shows her “inner life” pertinent. One of them, very significant, is when she hugs Antoni almost at the end of the book.
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