Katabasis

Alice is the main protagonist of the novel, which is primarily told from her third-person limited perspective. Alice is an unreliable narrator. She claims to be travelling to Hell to bring her idolized advisor, Jacob Grimes, back from the dead. The plot grows more complex as the narrative reveals the extent of Grimes’s abuse, which not even Alice herself has fully accepted, as well as Alice’s real reasons for seeking Grimes in the Underworld.

A katabasis is less about the protagonist’s physical journey and more about the personal journey and development that allows them to proceed. For Alice, this means coming to terms with Grimes’s abuse, what that means about his character, and letting go of some of the toxic models of behavior she was trained into by Grimes and the academy.

Alice’s initial priority in life is academic success. She willingly gives up half her mortal lifespan for the possibility of retrieving Grimes’s soul: “Would she rather graduate, produce brilliant research, and go out in a blaze of glory? Or would she rather live out her natural lifespan, gray haired and drooling, facing into irrelevance” (8). Alice prioritizes accolades and perceived professional success over her own material existence.