The stories in Linda Svendsen's Marine Life are stories of a particular family, as told by the narrator, Adele, the youngest child in a family of half-brother and -sisters. The first story in the book begins as all the children have begun, with the mother, and the story links the first child with the last, Ray with June. The two are fourteen years apart, and the way they relate has much to say about the family unit and will lead to the other stories in the book, stories of different relationships within the family, always from the standpoint of Adele and her responses to life.
This first story, "Who He Slept By," is a good beginning for the book for a number of reasons. first, it harks back to the beginning of the family, to the time when Ray was born, and then leads up to the contemporary period. The story thus covers most of the time period of the book right at the beginning, and subsequent stories fill in different eras, address different characters, and expand on the themes and ideas first developed in this opening tale. The importance of the brother to Adele in particular is clear in this story, for she views him much as she might a father, with some of the Freudian impulses and underlying tensions that might apply to a father. While it is not clearly stated in this story, the mother has been married more than once. Adele and Ray at least have different fathers, and none of the fathers have lasted. The girl thus seeks a father figure and finds it in her older brother, the clear choice given his much greater age and his somewhat irresponsible but fatherly attitudes toward the girl, as seen in the sequence on the beach as he propels her from one place to another and makes decisions regarding what she will and will not do.
The image that is carried through this story is a Freudian image inherent in the title--the girl gauges time and other aspects of life by the different women sleeping next to her older brother, inc...