Usually, when we read an Outlander novel for the first time, readers cannot determine the character associated with the prologue, especially as new characters are introduced and become important. The prologue of Drums of Autumn is one of those. With a second read, it comes to the mind that it is Brianna’s point of view stated in the prologue.
The prologue starts with Brianna mentioning that she has never been afraid of ghosts and that she lives with them all the time. She proceeds in describing the ghost of her mother, whom she misses often. Chapter 17 details how Brianna tries to cope without her mother. She mentions she pretended Claire was away on a long trip or dead. However, Claire is not dead, a fact that leads Brianna to worry about her parents.
“. . . See if she’s all right. But I keep thinking maybe I don’t want to find out, because what if I find out she’s not all right, what if I find out something horrible? . . .” (ch. 17)
It is this interest in the well being of her parents that lead her to research libraries and find the newspaper article which mentions that her parents died in a fire. The following passage in the prologue foreshadows Brianna’s findings:
Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.
This particular passage also deals with the notion of time travelers meeting different people in another period. Once they are back in their own time, all these people they interacted with in the past or future are “ghosts,” most likely dead if they are from the past. Memories of them persevere. In this way, characters from another time frame are always haunting time travelers.
Hope you enjoy reading this post, and I will be posting more about Drums in the following weeks. If you are interested in the visions that Brianna has about her father and vice-versa, I suggest reading the following post I wrote a few years ago.
Sources
Gabaldon, Diana. Drums of Autumn. New York: Dell Publishing. 1997. Print.