51 pages • 1 hour read
Abby JimenezPart of Your World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Alexis Montgomery
Content Warning: This section features discussions of emotional abuse.
Alexis Montgomery is one of the narrators and protagonists of Part of Your World. She is a 37-year-old ER doctor at Royaume Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and comes from a family of prestigious surgeons who have worked at Royaume since the hospital opened 125 years earlier. Alexis says she was “[b]red, molded, groomed, and told from [her] earliest age that [she] was destined to work at Royaume Northwestern and [she] was not to take [her] husband’s name if [she] ever got married” (35). The Montgomerys have extreme pride in their family legacy, which highly influences Alexis, although she chose to be a doctor of emergency medicine as she thought it would be the best way to help people. Previous to the novel’s timeframe, Alexis’s decision to go into emergency medicine rather than surgery is the only decision she has made against her parents’ wishes. The flipside of her family’s controlling nature is that she is also quite sheltered regarding society at large. Until she meets Daniel, Alexis takes most of her privilege for granted and does not have a full grasp of others’ circumstances outside of her insular community. During her time in Wakan with Daniel, she learns even more about the necessity of helping others and especially using her privilege to do so, developing the theme of Grace and Privilege. One of the things Alexis struggles most with is learning to understand others’ point of view and how the world she lives in is not one most people share.
Though Alexis is more privileged than most characters in the novel, she has also dealt with significant hardships, particularly her abuse by her ex-boyfriend and parents. The controlling and manipulative ways of her father, enabled by her mother, primed Alexis to be susceptible to further emotional abuse by her boyfriend Neil. She describes her abuse as cyclical and is seen dealing with the effects of it during her much healthier relationship with Daniel. Alexis only begins to stand up to Neil and, eventually, her parents once she learns to recognize their patterns of abuse and develops the tools and self-confidence to extricate herself. Alexis is also intent on helping other people experiencing intimate partner abuse such as Liz and her mother, as she knows the importance of believing women and being there for others; with her support, they are able to save themselves in their own time. However, Alexis’s desire to be constantly helpful and the abuse she has experienced all of her life often lead her to put her own priorities on the back burner. One of the most important things she learns toward the end of Part of Your World is that she should prioritize the things she cares about rather than the things she has been taught to care about by her abusers.
Daniel Grant
Daniel Grant is the other narrator and protagonist of Part of Your World. He is honorary mayor of the small town of Wakan, Minnesota. Like Alexis, his family has a long legacy, and he is the only one who remains to uphold it. Despite the absence of his parents, Daniel grew up to love his town and the people in it and learned the importance of grace and helpfulness from the grandparents who raised him. Daniel is constantly busy helping others as mayor while also running his family’s 125-year-old house as a bed-and-breakfast in an attempt to keep his absent mother from selling the property. This often prevents him from doing the woodworking that he loves yet undervalues.
Alexis notices early on that Daniel’s self-esteem is lacking, especially when he compares himself to her. Though he isn’t embarrassed of Wakan or what he does, he undersells himself and does not fully understand the impact his kindness has on members of his community. His kindness also has a significant impact on Alexis, who is unused to others caring for her. He is incredibly generous even though he is not as privileged as Alexis, and he ends up teaching her the message his grandmother taught him: that “grace costs you nothing” (101).
At their core, Daniel and Alexis are very similar in that they often put caring for others before anything else. Yet how Daniel and Alexis understand their relationship, particularly toward the beginning of the novel, is significantly different, in large part due to the different ways they experience The Influence of Legacy. While Alexis is obsessed with everything she should do or be, Daniel merely wants to spend time with her, telling her, “When you come down—no matter what you come down for—I’m going to make a big deal over it. Because it is a big deal” (68). Unlike Alexis, Daniel puts his feelings first and proudly shows Alexis off to his community, whereas he is immediately shunned when he tries to step foot in her world—a function of the class divide that separates them. Daniel therefore initially attributes Alexis’s hesitance to that divide as well as to their age gap. Yet even when he finally understands everything that holds Alexis back from wanting to be with him, he still feels that their love for one another outweighs any other problems. Overall, Daniel is primarily characterized through his relationship with Alexis, and his willingness to be with her contrasts with her hesitance to be with him.
Neil Rasmussen
Neil Rasmussen is the chief of surgery at Royaume Northwestern Hospital and Alexis’s emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend. Neil is several years older than Alexis and has a son from his first marriage who is nearly Daniel’s age. He is able to charm almost everyone he knows, particularly the Montgomerys, so Alexis has a hard time convincing others of her experience with him. Throughout their relationship, Neil targeted Alexis’s self-esteem in order to keep her dependent on him. As she explains: “It was like he liked me on eggshells. Like as long as I was running after him, begging him to tell me what was wrong, what I could do better, he was happy” (87). He would tell her that she smelled bad or did not look put together, despite Alexis’s obsessive efforts to please him, and prevented her from becoming independent by using her privilege against her; knowing she lacked certain basic housekeeping skills, he convinced her that she simply couldn’t take care of herself. Once he had her questioning her value, he would act kind and loving to imply how much he cared without actually apologizing or admitting his guilt. Neil continues to do this (like making her favorite quiche) when he moves back into the house they bought together, using his charm as well as his ability to manipulate others to make Alexis seem unreasonable.
Although his abuse increased throughout their seven years together, Alexis only broke up with Neil when she discovered him cheating: “I almost died of relief when he had that affair, because now I didn’t need an excuse to leave him” (87). In many ways, Neil is a foil to Daniel not only because of the disparities between their lifestyles and the worlds in which they live, but also in the ways that they treat Alexis. Neil turns off Alexis’s power to show her how much she needs him, whereas Daniel helps her turn the power back on and teaches her to be self-sufficient without worrying it will make her leave him. Alexis also notes that “Neil would have made a much better Montgomery than [she] ever did” (159), as he fits in with the long line of Montgomerys more concerned with image and prestige than basic human kindness. Yet Alexis is surprised when, at the end of the novel, Neil starts to take some responsibility for his actions after he begins going to therapy at her insistence. He begins to see how he hurt Alexis and why he was doing it, but he does not excuse his behavior, leaving open the possibility that Alexis may not hate him in the future.
The Montgomerys
Cecil, Jennifer, and Derek Montgomery are all surgeons who have worked at Royaume Northwestern Hospital, but all have left the hospital before Part of Your World begins, leaving Alexis as the last Montgomery able to uphold the family legacy. Derek, Alexis’s twin brother, is a plastic surgeon who was working with Doctors Without Borders in Cambodia when he fell in love with the superstar musician Lola Simone, whom he married and moved to Cambodia to be with. Alexis learns late in the novel that this caused her parents to cut off Derek, and her father refuses to even hear the name of his wife because he believes she tarnishes the Montgomery name. Derek does what Alexis is unable to do for so long: make his own happiness a priority and leave Royaume and his abusive parents, trapping Alexis at Royaume with Neil in the process. Although he is absent most of the novel, Alexis often thinks of Derek; she feels unable to make the choices he has even though she respects them. She does not realize until the end of the novel that he is still doing what he loves and helping people despite prioritizing his wife.
Alexis’s mother, Jennifer, is a surgeon and one of the faces of Royaume’s philanthropy. Though both she and her husband, Cecil, retired shortly before the novel begins, they are still very much involved with Royaume, and Jennifer is preparing Alexis to take over the role of Montogomery in residence at the hospital. Alexis’s relationship with her mother becomes more complicated throughout the course of the novel as she begins to see her father’s abuse for what it is. While she initially sees her mother as a victim, Alexis also realizes that Jennifer is an enabler: “[She] had normalized this abuse. Indulged it. She’d made me a participant, reinforced this behavior by giving my father what he wanted when he acted this way” (294). Jennifer defends her husband by noting that he is an old man worried about losing control of his legacy, but Alexis ultimately recognizes that this does not justify his actions, particularly as he has behaved this way throughout her life. Cecil is Alexis’s first abuser and takes advantage of the control he has over her and their family, losing his temper whenever someone does not abide by his wishes. He is unable to see any good reason for Alexis’s separation from Neil and insinuates that any abuse she experienced is her own fault and that she should reunite with Neil despite it. As a whole, the Montgomerys’ characterization highlights how Alexis learned to put herself last, and how this, in turn, was taken advantage of by others who sought to manipulate and control her.
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By Abby Jimenez
