In the Castle of My Skin Summary Summary Literary Essentials African American Literature In the Castle of My Skin is an autobiographical novel by a young native of Barbados living in England The novel s plot covers the years from the time of a great flood when the narrator is nine years old to the eve of his departure for the larger island of Trinidad at the age of seventeen The virtually unnamed narrator G clearly is a surrogate for the author though Lamming s narrative strategy of alternating first person and third person narrators has the effect of submerging G s identity beneath the larger collective identity and situation of the inhabitants of Creighton s Village The larger intended effect of the occasionally confusing alternation of narrators is that two mutually reinforcing stories are told within one narrative frame The first is the story of the ostensible protagonist s coming of age and the dawning of his political awareness The second story concerns the great social upheavals that occur over the years especially following the sale of the village by Mr Creighton the landlord to a group of men including Mr Slime the populist leader who betrays the villagers trust In the Castle of My Skin begins during a rainstorm on G s ninth birthday a reference to an actual flood that afflicted Barbados when Lamming was a child The early scenes of G s disappointment and his mother s response she put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing effectively establish the setting as well as the sense of collective identity awareness and suffering that are crucial to the novel s purpose The first person narrator makes this explicit as he describes his mother visiting with two neighbor women Miss Foster My mother Bob s mother It seemed they were three pieces in a pattern which remained constant The flow of its history was undisturbed by any difference in the pieces nor was its evenness affected by any likeness There was a difference and there was no difference In the domestic geography of the village he conveys a naturalness and innocence that surely will not last to the book s end In the corner where one fence merged into another and the sunlight filtering through the leaves made a limitless suffusion over the land the pattern had arranged itself with absolute unawareness The important third chapter written in the third person achieves a skillful segue from a general depiction of a boy s school and a Queen s Birthday celebration to a subtly crucial plot element involving a potential scandal for a teacher Mr Slime who resigns and later becomes a populist leader The short fourth chapter features a discussion by Ma and Pa an emblematic chorus like elderly couple of Mr Slime s new projects the Penny Bank and the Friendly Society Referring to the migration of many West Indians early in the twentieth century to Panama to work building the canal there Ma says Tis a next Panama we need now for the young ones I sit there sometimes an I wonder what s goin to become o them the young that comin up so fast to take the place o the old Tis a next Panama we want Pa or there goin to be bad times comin this way Much of the heart of the novel is nearly plotless though not purposeless The narrator and his friends Trumper and Boy Blue engage in adolescent ruminations on the beach Many of the ideas expressed by the three boys about the sadness and loss of growing up about sexual awakening about their place in the village and their wonder at the opportunities of the outside world are hardly specific to the Caribbean These universal themes establish In the Castle of My Skin squarely in the tradition of the bildungsroman The narrator goes off to the High School establishing an unwanted distance between him and his friends A riot like the flood the fictional counterpart of a historical event in Barbados jars the villagers into an uneasy awareness that times are changing Trumper emigrates to the United States He returns just in time to tell the narrator about that country The novel ends with the narrator on the verge of leaving for Trinidad and the community on the verge of ruin from the landlord s sale of its land to a group including the apparently treacherous Mr Slime Mr Slime s complicity in the land sale is not narrated explicitly but can be supposed from strong hints In the Castle of My Skin Summary Critical Guide to British Fiction Told in the first person and the third person this is the story of G but it is also the story of Creighton s Village as it experiences major changes ranging from the break up of the feudal colonial plantation system with its dominating white Landlord and Great House to a new age of labor unrest an emergent black elite and awakening nationalism Richard Wright s introduction to the novel notes that the work is a symbolic repetition of the story of millions of simple folk who are today being catapulted out of their peaceful indigenously earthy lives and into the turbulence and anxiety of the twentieth century The four boys G Trumper Boy Blue and Bob at the center of the tale with their experiences and with their own tales within the larger tale serve for the reader as keys to the community They share their sport and contemplations but eventually their paths diverge when G unlike the others after succeeding at an examination goes on to high school with its aura of a different class The High School was intended to educate the children of the clerical and professional classes while the village school served the needs of the villagers who were poor simple and without a very marked sense of social prestige At this crucial point some go to the left and others to the right and once parted most of them never really meet again Thus G becomes more and more of an exile alienated from both the urban high school and the village even as he tries to keep his feet planted in both worlds The novel exposes some of the impositions of colonial education In the village school the children learn many points of English history and ceremonially observe Empire Day and the Queen s Birthday Yet as the shoemaker with his commonsense punditry points out they are taught nothing of Africa or Marcus Garvey nothing of their own history as black people Ironically Trumper discovers black kinship away from home when he spends time through the contract labor system in the United States Barbados Little