Content Warning: This text discusses systemic racism, police violence, and the death of a Black man.

The unnamed narrator and protagonist of Open Water is a young man born to Ghanian parents living in south-east London. He is likely in his early to mid-twenties, given that his college-going brother is five years younger than him. He went to an elite secondary school alongside mostly wealthy white students who often treated him as a stereotype. This was a period of his life that he survived through playing basketball. As a photographer and writer, the narrator finds his greatest joy in Black art, specifically music in a range of genres.

The narrator’s character arc is the primary focus of the novel. He begins as someone who minimizes himself and what he loves, as shown when he is introduced as a photographer and brushes the word off, saying instead that he “take[s] pictures, sometimes” (4). He represses himself emotionally and is careful about what he shares, as in his discussion with the woman about Isaiah Rashad’s music. He doesn’t “tell her that the album had soundtracked [his] previous summer” (16), keeping back the fact that Rashad’s song to his grandmother was a lifeline for the narrator after his own beloved grandmother’s passing.