This interdisciplinary book provides a critical reading of Exodus 2 from the threefold perspective of empathy, postcolonialism and focalization. The interpretation is in turn grounded in a theorization of the author's personal story including growing up as a female adoptee of a single mother in a patriarchal context, and current material context as an immigrant in New Zealand. It offers several things: a novel reading strategy for interpreting literary narratives based on a universal human trait: empathy; two, its reading offers insights and perspectives hitherto unidentified or ignored in other reading approaches; three, a thorough exploration of the current status of postcolonial criticism is offered and four, the contextualized adaptation of Mieke Bal's complex focalization critical theory can help make it more accessible to a wider audience. Not least, the autobiographical strand offers a revealing glimpse of the author's initially reluctant odyssey into her own postcolonial heart of darkness.