Unnamed Narrator 11

The twelve-year-old boy who narrates "Race at Morning" is the child of a share-cropping couple. He is devoted to Mister Ernest, the landlord who adopted him at age ten after both his parents abandoned him. He is earnest and hard-working, and passionate about hunting, but also illiterate - though as Will Legate notes, he "knows every cuss word in the dictionary, every poker hand in the deck and every whisky label in the distillery" (296). At the end of the story Mister Ernest tells him it's time for him to start going to school, and there's no reason to think he would disobey; however, the idiomatic nature of his narrative - "et" for ate (296), "I would 'a' had to" for "I would have had to" (297), and so on - suggests he is telling it orally rather than writing it.