Moon Tiger

Content Warning: This section of the guide contain references to incest.

Claudia Hampton is the protagonist and the primary narrator of Moon Tiger. The novel is a frame story, with Claudia’s dying days in the hospital as the frame through which the rest of the narrative unfolds. Claudia is an unreliable narrator; often, the details that Claudia recounts are contradicted when the same moment is described from a different character’s perspective, emphasizing The Subjective Nature of Memory. Building further on this theme is Claudia’s self-awareness: She is conscious of her own unreliability. In fact, she is fascinated by the concept that memory and bias affect people’s stories and thus affect history: “Argument, of course, is the whole point of history […] If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre” (14).

Claudia is characterized as a passionate, unconventional woman. Thinking of her childhood, she writes: “I always ached—burned—to go higher and faster and further. They admonished. I disobeyed” (3). Claudia, born in England in the early 1900s, is of a generation that had culturally strict social norms for girls and women.