Where was I

Here, and elsewhere throughout the narrative, the storytelling father blurs the line between 1) the world in which he is narrating to his young daughter and 2) the world in which the story takes place and the characters act. This blurring occurs, for instance, in the potential confusion of "the little girl" who is the daughter listening to her father and "the other little girl" (emphasis added) who is the character terrorized by the ghosts of the slaughtered Thanksgiving turkeys. By asking "Where was I?" the father-narrator is asking both where he had arrived in the narrative sequence, before being interrupted, and also in which world his consciousness was located: that of the fictional story or that of the narrative telling.

The ambiguity concerning the reality of these two worlds later permits the exploration of the possibilities for such alternative realties as ghosts and talking animal ghosts. This is part of the narrative's interrogation of the boundaries that separate worlds, realities, and also species (the human world versus the animal kingdom, for instance).