Brotherless Night

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Sashi is the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel. A member of the persecuted Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, she describes her experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war that begins in the 1980s. At the novel’s opening, she is an innocent teenager who dreams of becoming a doctor. However, she is drawn into the conflict and becomes involved in the fates of her older brothers and her friend K, who join the Tamil militants. Disillusioned with the violence of the war, Sashi eventually takes on the responsibility of recording the truth about the conflict, helping her mentor Anjali compile the Reports, which document the human rights violations committed by all sides. In her role as protagonist and archivist, Sashi also works to involve the readers in her story and in the history of Sri Lanka. Her frequent asides, in which she directly addresses her readers in the second person—by saying, “You must understand,” for example (3, 231, 259, 319, 341)—are ways in which she asks for her readers’ empathy.

Sashi is a teenager and a young woman for much of the novel—she is only 24 when she leaves Sri Lanka.