ACC - The Short Story - Literary Analysis and Composition

English 1302
Literary Analysis and

Composition
Prof. Jimmy C. Stephens, M.S., M.Ed.
Updated: 7/17/2014

Story Telling has been a valued skill in human history, providing both entertainment and education. Much of our knowledge of
the early beliefs of civilization comes to us from the voices of Bards, Poets, Skalds and Story Tellers long departed.

2
The Short Story - Literary Analysis and Composition.docx
Pages in this document may contain hypertext links to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links provide additional information that
may be useful or interesting and are being provided only for citation purposes. The author does not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of this
outside information. The author does not endorse the organizations sponsoring linked websites and does not endorse the views they express or the products/services they offer.

3

I. Table of Contents
I. Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................................... 3
II. Composition II Course Syllabus ........................................................................................................... 13
Prerequisite .......................................................................................................................................... 13
Course Description .............................................................................................................................. 13
Course Objectives ................................................................................................................................ 13
Course Outcomes ................................................................................................................................ 13
Requirements ....................................................................................................................................... 13
III. Literary Analysis and Composition ................................................................................................. 37
Essential Questions ................................................................................................................................. 37
Fair Use ................................................................................................................................................... 37
Objectives ................................................................................................................................................ 38
HOLD HARMLESS AGREEMENT .......................................................................................................... 39
NCTE/IRA Standards .............................................................................................................................. 45
TEKS Covered In This Unit ..................................................................................................................... 47
IV. Literary Analysis: Pre-Assessment ................................................................................................. 55
The Prose Passage Essay ...................................................................................................................... 57
An Analysis of James Joyce's Short Story The Dead: Loving and Losing ........................................... 59
The Dead Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 61
Student Essay A ...................................................................................................................................... 67
Student Essay B ...................................................................................................................................... 71
Rubrics ..................................................................................................................................................... 75
Rating the Student Essays ...................................................................................................................... 77
Literary Analysis Rubric ........................................................................................................................... 83
V. Getting Started: The Most Dangerous Game .............................................................................. 85
The Most Dangerous Game .................................................................................................................... 87
VI. Writing About Literature ................................................................................................................ 101
On-Line Guides to Writing About Literature .......................................................................................... 103
Nobel Laureates in Literature ................................................................................................................ 105
Introductory Note: The Paradox of Literature ........................................................................................ 107
A Students Guide to Literature ............................................................................................................. 109
VII. Response & Analysis .................................................................................................................... 123
Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................................................... 127
View of a Pig - Ted Hughes ............................................................................................................... 127
VIII. How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay ........................................................................................ 145
Writing About Literature (Fiction) ........................................................................................................... 155

4

What this handout is about ................................................................................................................ 155
Demystifying the process ................................................................................................................... 155
1. Become familiar with the text. .......................................................................................................... 156
2. Explore potential topics ................................................................................................................... 156
3. Select a topic with a lot of evidence .................................................................................................. 157
4. Write out a working thesis ............................................................................................................... 157
5. Make an extended list of evidence .................................................................................................... 157
6. Select your evidence ........................................................................................................................ 158
7. Refine your thesis ............................................................................................................................ 159
8. Organize your evidence ................................................................................................................... 159
9. Interpret your evidence .................................................................................................................... 159
General hints .......................................................................................................................................... 159
1. Make your thesis relevant to your readers ......................................................................................... 160
2. Select a topic of interest to you ......................................................................................................... 160
3. Make your thesis specific ................................................................................................................. 160
Works consulted ..................................................................................................................................... 160
The Basic Structure of an Academic Essay .......................................................................................... 163
Writing Papers of Literary Analysis: ................................................................................................... 173
Key Points: .......................................................................................................................................... 173
Organization ....................................................................................................................................... 173
Content: what to say ............................................................................................................................ 173
Style .................................................................................................................................................... 175
Mechanics .......................................................................................................................................... 176
Documentation and quoting................................................................................................................ 176
Pet peeves ........................................................................................................................................... 177
IX. The Seven Elements of Fiction ..................................................................................................... 181
The Seven Elements of Fiction: The Most Dangerous Game ......................................................... 183
Character .......................................................................................................................................... 185
Student Notes on The Seven Elements of Fiction ................................................................................ 189
Elements of the Short Story: Setting .................................................................................................. 189
Elements of the Short Story: Central Idea (Theme) .......................................................................... 190
Elements of the Short Story: Character ............................................................................................. 194
Round ................................................................................................................................................ 196
Flat ..................................................................................................................................................... 196
Dynamic ............................................................................................................................................. 196
Static .................................................................................................................................................. 196
Elements of the Short Story: Conflict ................................................................................................. 197

5

Elements of the Short Story: Point of View ........................................................................................ 198
X. Student Essay: Exemplars ............................................................................................................ 199
The Story of an Hour ............................................................................................................................. 201
XI. Literary Analysis & Criticism .......................................................................................................... 223
Approaches to Literary Criticism ........................................................................................................... 225
Biographical: ...................................................................................................................................... 225
Historical: ........................................................................................................................................... 225
Geographical: ..................................................................................................................................... 225
Political: .............................................................................................................................................. 225
Philosophical and Religious: .............................................................................................................. 226
Sociological/Anthropological: ............................................................................................................. 226
Psychological: .................................................................................................................................... 227
XIII. Introduction to Modern Literary Theory ......................................................................................... 229
Literary Trends and Influences* ......................................................................................................... 229
New Criticism ..................................................................................................................................... 229
Archetypal / Myth Criticism ................................................................................................................ 230
Psychoanalytic Criticism .................................................................................................................... 231
Marxism ............................................................................................................................................. 232
Postcolonialism .................................................................................................................................. 233
Existentialism ..................................................................................................................................... 234
Phenomenology and Hermeneutics ................................................................................................... 235
Russian Formalism / Prague Linguistic Circle/Linguistic Criticism/Dialogic Theory .......................... 237
Avant-Garde / Surrealism / Dadaism ................................................................................................. 238
Structuralism and Semiotics .............................................................................................................. 238
Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction ............................................................................................. 240
Postmodernism .................................................................................................................................. 242
New Historicism ................................................................................................................................. 243
Reception and Reader-Response Theory ......................................................................................... 245
Feminism ........................................................................................................................................... 246
Genre Criticism .................................................................................................................................. 248
Autobiographical Theory .................................................................................................................... 250
Travel Theory ..................................................................................................................................... 252
XIV. Critical Approaches to Literature ................................................................................................... 255
FEMINIST CRITICISM ....................................................................................................................... 255
THE NEW HISTORICISM .................................................................................................................. 256
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM ....................................................................................................... 257
STRUCTURALISM ............................................................................................................................ 258

6

MARXIST CRITICISM........................................................................................................................ 259
THE NEW CRITICISM ....................................................................................................................... 260
FORMALISM ...................................................................................................................................... 261
POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM ........................................................................................................... 261
Myth Criticism ........................................................................................................................................ 263
Overview ............................................................................................................................................ 263
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 263
Published Examples of Myth Criticism ............................................................................................... 264
Time ................................................................................................................................................... 264
Conclusions: Suggestions ................................................................................................................. 267
References ......................................................................................................................................... 267
Internet Resources ............................................................................................................................. 267
Periods of English Literature ................................................................................................................. 269
Periods of World Literature .................................................................................................................... 277
XV. Writing About Prose: A Student Handbook ................................................................................... 281
Poor Example ........................................................................................................................................ 283
Writing About Prose ............................................................................................................................... 285
Writing Literary Essays: An Overview ................................................................................................... 293
General Questions to Consider in Analyzing Literature ........................................................................ 295
General Questions for Analysis and Evaluation of Literature ................................................................ 297
Suggestions about Writing a Prose Passage for the C Test ............................................................... 299
General Composition Reminders .......................................................................................................... 303
College Writing ................................................................................................................................... 305
What this handout is about... ............................................................................................................. 305
What is a five-paragraph theme? ....................................................................................................... 305
Why do high schools teach the five-paragraph theme? .................................................................... 305
Why don't five-paragraph themes work well for college writing? ....................................................... 305
How do I break out of writing five-paragraph themes? ...................................................................... 306
Is it ever OK to write a five-paragraph theme? .................................................................................. 308
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 308
Argument ............................................................................................................................................... 309
Arguments are everywhere... ............................................................................................................. 309
Making a Claim .................................................................................................................................. 309
Evidence ............................................................................................................................................ 310
Counterargument ............................................................................................................................... 311
Audience ............................................................................................................................................ 311

7

Critical Reading .................................................................................................................................. 312
References: ........................................................................................................................................ 312
Toulmin's Analysis ................................................................................................................................. 313
Toulmins Model of Argument ................................................................................................................ 317
Brainstorming ........................................................................................................................................ 319
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 319
Brainstorming Techniques ................................................................................................................. 319
Freewriting ......................................................................................................................................... 319
Break down the topic into levels: ....................................................................................................... 320
Listing/Bulleting: ................................................................................................................................. 320
Cubing: ............................................................................................................................................... 321
Similes: .............................................................................................................................................. 321
Clustering/ Mapping/ Webbing: .......................................................................................................... 321
Relationship Between the Parts: ........................................................................................................ 322
Journalistic Questions: ....................................................................................................................... 322
Thinking Outside the Box: .................................................................................................................. 323
Using Charts or Shapes: .................................................................................................................... 323
Consider Purpose and Audience: ...................................................................................................... 323
Dictionaries, Thesauruses, Encyclopedias: ....................................................................................... 323
Closing ............................................................................................................................................... 324
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 324
Introductions .......................................................................................................................................... 325
What this handout is about ................................................................................................................ 325
The Role of Introductions ................................................................................................................... 325
Why bother writing a good introduction? ........................................................................................... 325
Strategies for Writing an Effective Introduction ................................................................................. 325
How to Evaluate Your Introduction Draft ........................................................................................... 327
Five Kinds of Less Effective Introductions ......................................................................................... 327
Sources .............................................................................................................................................. 328
Thesis Statements ................................................................................................................................. 329
What this handout is about ............................................................................................................. 329
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 329
What is a thesis statement? ............................................................................................................... 329
How do I get a thesis? ....................................................................................................................... 329
How do I know if my thesis is strong? ................................................................................................ 330
Examples ........................................................................................................................................... 330

8

Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 331
Paragraph Development ........................................................................................................................ 333
What is a paragraph?......................................................................................................................... 333
How do I decide what to put in a paragraph? .................................................................................... 333
5-step process to paragraph development ........................................................................................ 334
Now here is a look at the completed paragraph: ............................................................................... 335
Beneath the Formula for Paragraph Development ............................................................................ 337
In Review ........................................................................................................................................ 338
More Help ....................................................................................................................................... 338
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 338
Transitions ............................................................................................................................................. 339
The Function and Importance of Transitions ..................................................................................... 339
Organization ....................................................................................................................................... 339
How Transitions Work ........................................................................................................................ 339
Types of Transitions ........................................................................................................................... 340
Transitional Expressions .................................................................................................................... 340
Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................... 343
About Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 343
Why bother writing a good conclusion? ............................................................................................. 343
Strategies for Writing an Effective Conclusion .................................................................................. 343
Strategies to Avoid ............................................................................................................................. 344
Four Kinds of Ineffective Conclusions ............................................................................................... 344
Sources .............................................................................................................................................. 345
XVI. Excerpts from Professional Literary Criticism ............................................................................... 347
Gender and Authorial Limitation In Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily." ..................................................... 349
XVII. Short Stories.................................................................................................................................. 357
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children ................................................................. 359
The Destructors ..................................................................................................................................... 362
Miss Brill ................................................................................................................................................ 372
A Perfect Day for Bananafish ................................................................................................................ 375
Once upon a Time ................................................................................................................................. 387
Eveline ................................................................................................................................................... 391
A Rose for Emily .................................................................................................................................... 395
The Swimmer ........................................................................................................................................ 401

9

The Drunkard ......................................................................................................................................... 407
A&P ........................................................................................................................................................ 413
Bahnwrter Thiel ................................................................................................................................... 417
The Yellow Wallpaper ............................................................................................................................ 435
XVIII. Student Notes............................................................................................................................ 449
Student Notes: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" ...................................................................... 451
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" ............................................................................................ 453
The Master of Short Forms ................................................................................................................ 455
Overview of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings ....................................................................... 457
The Logic of Wings: Garca Mrquez, Todorov, and the Endless Resources of Fantasy ................. 461
Student Notes: The Destructors .......................................................................................................... 467
Graham Greene ................................................................................................................................. 469
Student Notes: Miss Brill ..................................................................................................................... 473
Overview of Miss Brill ...................................................................................................................... 475
"Miss Brill" .......................................................................................................................................... 479
Plot Summary: "Miss Brill" ................................................................................................................. 485
Plot ..................................................................................................................................................... 485
Characters ......................................................................................................................................... 486
Alienation in Miss Brill ........................................................................................................................ 487
Themes and Construction: "Miss Brill" ............................................................................................... 489
Study Questions: "Miss Brill" ............................................................................................................. 491
Historical Context: "Miss Brill" ............................................................................................................ 493
Sample Student Essay on Katherine Mansfields Miss Brill ............................................................ 495
An Explication of a Student Essay in Critical Analysis ...................................................................... 497
Student Notes: A Perfect Day for Bananafish ..................................................................................... 505
J. D. Salinger: Seventy-Eight Bananas.............................................................................................. 507
J. D. Salinger ..................................................................................................................................... 513
J. D. Salinger: The Mirror of Crisis ..................................................................................................... 521
J. D. Salinger: Rare Quixotic Gesture ................................................................................................ 525
J. D. Salinger ..................................................................................................................................... 531
Student Notes: Once Upon a Time ..................................................................................................... 533
Gordimers Once Upon a Time ........................................................................................................ 535
Student Notes: Eveline ........................................................................................................................ 537
James Joyce ...................................................................................................................................... 539
Criticism by Harry Levin ..................................................................................................................... 553
Additional Material ............................................................................................................................. 555
Student Notes: A Rose for Emily ........................................................................................................ 557

10

Old Boys, Mostly American: William Faulkner, The Short Stories ..................................................... 559
A Rose for Emily .............................................................................................................................. 561
Gender and Authorial Limitation in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" .................................................... 567
Student Notes: The Swimmer ............................................................................................................. 575
THE SWIMMER (1968)...................................................................................................................... 577
The Swimmer ..................................................................................................................................... 579
The Swimmer: A Midsummer's Nightmare ........................................................................................ 585
The Swimmer ..................................................................................................................................... 589
Student Notes: The A&P ..................................................................................................................... 591
Plot Summary: "A & P" ....................................................................................................................... 593
Plot ..................................................................................................................................................... 593
Characters ......................................................................................................................................... 594
The A&P .......................................................................................................................................... 595
The Art of John Updike's "A & P" ....................................................................................................... 601
A&P Notes to Ponder for Composition Improvement ...................................................................... 603
"A & P" Essay Question ..................................................................................................................... 604
XIX. Stories for Compositions ............................................................................................................... 605
The Scarlet Ibis ...................................................................................................................................... 607
The Metamorphosis ............................................................................................................................... 611
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson ............................................................................................................. 639
Young Goodman Brown ........................................................................................................................ 647
The Notorious Jumping Frog ................................................................................................................. 657
The Things They Carried ....................................................................................................................... 661
Memento Mori ........................................................................................................................................ 673
Sonny's Blues ........................................................................................................................................ 685
Harrison Bergeron ................................................................................................................................. 705
The Utterly Perfect Murder .................................................................................................................... 711
XX. Literature and Composition Exam: The Prose Passage Essay C Test Literature and Composition Exam:
The Prose Passage Essay ............................................................................................................................... 717
XX. Literature and Composition Exam: The Prose Passage Essay .................................................................. 719
Summative Assessment ........................................................................................................................ 723
XXI. Appendix I: Literary Analysis Papers - Successful Student Examples ......................................... 725
The Lord of the Rings ........................................................................................................................ 727
Chopins Artistry in The Story of an Hour ........................................................................................ 733
XXII. Appendix II: A Glossary of Literary Terms .................................................................................... 793
A Glossary of Literary Terms ................................................................................................................. 795
XXIV. Appendix III: A Vocabulary of Attitudes ..................................................................................... 821
A Vocabulary of Attitudes ...................................................................................................................... 823

11

XXV. Appenxix IV: Concepts for Literature ........................................................................................ 825
Concepts for Literature .......................................................................................................................... 827
XXVI. Appendix VI: Suggested Stories for Additional Reading ........................................................... 829
Suggested Stories For Additional Reading ........................................................................................... 831

12

13

II. Composition II Course Syllabus
ENG. 1302 - Spring 2011

Professor: Jimmy Stephens, M.S., M.Ed.
Email: Jimmy@Stephens.org / jstephe1@AustinCC.edu
Mailbox: Library
Office Hours: As scheduled
Course Hours: M & W 7:45AM 9:00AM

Prerequisite
Enrollment in ENGL 1302 requires credit for ENGL 1301, or its equivalent, with at least a grade of C. Instructor will
verify.

Course Description
ENGLISH 1302 is a continuation of English 1301 with emphasis on analysis of readings in prose fiction. Students will use
literary elements to interpret short fiction.

Course Objectives
The goals of Composition II are to promote
Critical thinking, reading, and writing within an intercultural context;
Clear, coherent, confident, and effective communication;
Collaborative writing and learning;
Literary analysis.

Course Outcomes
Upon completion of English 1302, students should be able to
Think, read, and write critically;
Effectively use referential (interpretive/analytical) writing;
Critically analyze fiction;
Appreciate and understand how the elements of fiction work together.

Requirements
This course will focus on seven elements of fiction: central idea, character, conflict, point of view, setting, language,
and tone. These elements will be incorporated into five to seven writing assignments, varying in length from 200-1000
words (for a minimum total of 2500 words) and using either a cumulative or single-element approach. To qualify for the
Departmental Exam, in at least one paper students must demonstrate their mastery of MLA style for documentation by using

14

parenthetical documentation and providing a list of works cited that contains at least one source other than the primary
source.
In addition, all TEKS will be covered as required by the state.

High School Rules and Responsibilities
All high school rules and responsibilities are in full force. Absences and grades will be reported to school administration.

Use of Cameras and Recording Devices
Use of recording devices, including camera phones and tape recorders, is prohibited in classrooms, laboratories, faculty
offices, and other locations where instruction, tutoring, or testing occurs. These devices are also not allowed to be used in
campus restrooms. Students with disabilities who need to use a recording device as a reasonable accommodation should
contact the Office for Students with Disabilities for information regarding reasonable accommodations.

Student Freedom of Expression
Each student is strongly encouraged to participate in class. In any classroom situation that includes discussion and
critical thinking, there are bound to be many differing viewpoints. These differences enhance the learning experience
and create an atmosphere where students and instructors alike will be encouraged to think and learn. On sensitive and
volatile topics, students may sometimes disagree not only with each other but also with the instructor. It is expected that
faculty and students will respect the views of others when expressed in classroom discussions.

Participation and Preparation
In addition to the four papers, the department exam, and the A and B papers, students are expected to come to
class prepared with all homework assignments and participate in all class work during class time. Each class day, students
will be assessed a checkmark for preparation and a checkmark for participation. In order to qualify to submit the A
paper, students must have at minimum a 90% participation and preparation grade. In order to qualify to submit the B
paper, students must have at minimum an 80% participation and preparation grade.

Preparation grades will include but are not limited to the following:
Reading the assigned story for the day
Completing the assigned reading response for the day
Bringing to class rough drafts of papers on peer editing days
Bringing to class all writing practice assignments
Bringing the assigned textbooks to class

Participation grades will include but are not limited to the following:
Attending class
Participating in class discussions
Reading in-class assignments
Participating in in-class writing assignments
Taking in-class quizzes and self-assessments
Sharing written work with other students
Peer editing other students work
Participating in the start of class and exit pass activities

Quizzes and reading responses will only be given during class. No make-up quizzes will be given, and students arriving
after the quiz begins or leaving before it is given forfeit their right to take the quiz.

Important Calendar Dates
(Subject to Change)
January 19 First Day of Class
February 21 Holiday
February 9 Peer Edit Paper #1
March 2 Peer Edit Paper #2
March 14, 16 Spring Break (no class)
March 23 Peer Edit Paper #3
April 13 Peer Edit Paper #4
April 25 Withdraw Deadline

15
Pages in this document may contain hypertext links to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links provide additional
information that may be useful or interesting and are being provided only for citation purposes. The author does not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance,
timeliness, or completeness of this outside information. The author does not endorse the organizations sponsoring linked websites and does not endorse the views they
express or the products/services they offer.

May 9 Last Day of Class

Required Textbooks
Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2010.
ISBN-10: 0312596235
ISBN-13: 978-0312596231

Hacker, Diana. The Bedford Handbook. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2009.
(Be sure it is the 2009 update.)
ISBN-10: 0312652690
ISBN-13: 978-0312652692

A Note on Textbook Availability: I cannot postpone the readings. It is your responsibility to purchase the required
texts as quickly as possible; if you cannot find the textbook at the RCC bookstore, I suggest that you check other ACC
bookstores, as well as Bevo's and other college book retailers in Austin.

Grading
I will use the following marks for grading essays: Accept/Edit/Revise/Rewrite

ACCEPTED!: the paper fulfills the objectives of the assignment and is relatively free of grammatical, spelling, and
punctuation errors.

EDIT: the paper fulfills the objectives of the assignment but contains errors. You must
avoid similar errors in subsequent papers in order to progress in the course.

REVISE: the paper needs improvement in style, organization, or development.

REWRITE!: the paper does not fulfill the objectives of the assignment.

"B" Requirement: Write an essay according to guidelines provided by your instructor. Minimum length: 1000 words.
Your instructor may provide an alternative assignment. The B paper will be evaluated Accept or Rewrite only.

"A" PAPER: Following guidelines provided by your instructor, write an essay using two or more sources on a similar topic.
Minimum length: 1000 words. MLA Documentation required. The A paper will be evaluated Accept or Rewrite
only.

Students must receive Accepted on six essays to be eligible to receive a permit for taking the Departmental Exam.
Additional assignments are required for the grades of B and A.

Your final grade will be determined by the grade level you complete. Each paper will be marked "ACCEPTED,"
"EDIT," "REVISE," or "REWRITE." (You may submit only one paper at a time; when one is ACCEPTED, you
may submit the next one.) In addition, compliance with your instructor's point system for deadlines and activities may
determine your eligibility for a grade of "B" or "A."

The Departmental Exam
The Departmental Exam will be taken under supervision in the Testing Center. Given a selection to read, you will write an
interpretive essay of at least 750 words analyzing the selection. This essay will be evaluated "ACCEPTED" or "RETEST"
only. If you do not pass on the first try, you may retest twice. Your essay must include a summary, analysis, and evaluation
and must demonstrate the following

coherence, critical thinking, and an understanding of the selection's thesis,
purpose(s), and method(s) of organization;

16

adherence to stylistic, grammatical, and mechanical conventions

I will establish deadlines by which you must complete a specific number of assignments or be subject to WITHDRAWAL
from the course. It is your responsibility to know whether your instructor will withdraw you if you do not meet such
deadlines.

NOTE
You must provide your instructor with a Composition II File Folder (available in the ACC bookstores) for your
papers. Your instructor will keep your folder for one semester following your enrollment. You are responsible for making
copies of any papers you want to keep for your files.
Learning Lab Policy for B and A Papers
Departmental policy allows students to receive only very general assistance writing B and A papers in Composition I
and II. Examples of such assistance include pre-writing activities and review of writing principles and of grammar and
documentation conventions in response to student questions. In addition, individual faculty are free to prohibit students
from seeking specific kinds of or any assistance on the B and A papers and may do so by sending a memo to the
learning labs and by stipulating the restriction in class syllabi.

Scholastic Dishonesty
Acts prohibited by the College for which discipline may be administered include scholastic dishonesty, including but not
limited to cheating on an exam or quiz, plagiarizing, and unauthorized collaboration with another in preparing outside
work. Academic work submitted by students shall be
the result of their thought, research, or self-
expression. Academic work is defined as, but not
limited to tests, quizzes, whether taken electronically
or on paper; projects, either individual or group;
classroom presentations, and homework' (Student
Handbook).

I will not tolerate any form of academic dishonesty.
Violation of ACC rules against the above will result in
the filing of a formal complaint with the College,
dismissal from this course, and a final grade of F.

Students with Disabilities
Each ACC campus offers support services for
students with documented physical or psychological
disabilities. Students with disabilities must request
reasonable accommodations through the Office for
Students with Disabilities on the campus where they
expect to take the majority of their classes. Students
are encouraged to do this three weeks before the start
of the semester' (Student Handbook).

Phones, Laptops, etc.
Turn off and secure all electronic devices laptop computers, cellphones, Blackberries, pagers, etc. - in purse, pocket,
or backpack upon entering the classroom. Regarding the use of laptops, it has been my experience that laptops are a
distraction to other students. I encourage the taking of notes in ENGL 1302 (in fact, careful note-taking is crucial to
success in this course), but please take your notes by hand. You can always type them up after class. It's a useful review
technique.

Contacting the Instructor

17

I am available both before and after class, and as scheduled. Outside of office hours, you can contact me via voicemail
or email. In either case I will respond within 24 hours. I am happy to answer questions about course policies and
assignments, but read the course material first.

Email Etiquette
Should you have need to email me, make sure that your message has a clear subject line including the course number,
your name, and the reason for your email. Emails with blank subject lines or vague subjects ("Hi!" or "question," to cite
two examples) are indistinguishable from spam and will go into the trash unread, as will emails informing me that you
were absent from class and asking "did I miss anything?"(Yes, you did. Check the syllabus.)
Since I'm your English instructor, humor me and strive for clear and appropriate English (Edited American English) in
your email communications.

Classroom Etiquette
Gentlemen, please remove your hat or cap while in the classroom. Ladies, personal grooming (hair, makeup, etc.) in
class is not appropriate.

Attendance/Tardiness Policy
I will take roll every day at the beginning of class. If you come in after the roll is called, it is your responsibility to i nform
me of your presence so that I may mark you tardy rather than absent (but please wait until after class). Two late arrivals
will count as one absence. Students with more than five absences (other than work days) will be ineligible to receive a
final grade higher than C; I will not give warnings, so keep track of your attendance. The majority of the information in
this course comes from lecture and handouts, so regular and punctual attendance is vital to your success. You are
responsible for information covered in class, whether you were present or not.
Please note that attendance is required on days marked CONFERENCE DAY. On these days I will set aside time for
individual consultation on assignments, etc. On days marked WORK DAY, we will not meet as a class, but I will be
available for consultation, submissions, etc.

Reading Assignments/Quizzes
Familiarize yourself with this syllabus, consult it daily, and keep up with the readings outlined in the schedule; I may give
reading quizzes on the course material. These quizzes will be given at the beginning of class, and cannot be made up.

Writing Assignment Due Dates
Unless otherwise indicated all assignments are due on the dates given in the course schedule. I will return papers to you
on the following class day. You must return edits, revisions, and rewrites to me by the next class, accompanied by the
original essay. I cannot accept multiple submissions
Your previous essay must be accepted before you will be allowed submit the next assignment!

Format and Presentation
All essays submitted for this course must conform to Modern Language Association (MLA) format I require that
your essays be typewritten and consistently double-spaced, with standard margins. All essays must be stapled. Please use
Courier New font (12-point). For more information and a sample page, see "Format for Essays" below. I will return
improperly formatted, unstapled, or poorly printed submissions unevaluated.

Withdrawal Policy
I do not withdraw students for any reason. If you decide that you no longer wish to attend the course, you must fill out
a withdrawal form and submit it to Admissions and Records. The final day to withdraw is posted on the college web site.
After that date, you cannot withdraw from the course.

The Texas Legislature has recently passed a bill that new ACC students should be aware of. According to a new state
law, students enrolling for the first time in Fall 2007 or later at any Texas college or university may not withdraw (receive
a W) from more than six courses during their undergraduate college career. Students are encouraged to select courses
carefully, and contact an advisor or counselor for assistance.

Incompletes
I do not issue incompletes in ENGL 1302.

18

19

Format for Essays

All essays submitted for this class should be typewritten and consistently double-spaced, and must conform to
standard Modern Language Association format.
Use 12-point Courier New (or Courier, if Courier New isn't available on your computer) for all essays,
and consistently double-space your essay.
On the first page only, in the upper left hand corner, place your name, the course number (ENGL
1302), my name, the number of the essay (Essay 1, Essay 2, whatever, and the date. On all pages,
place your last name and the page number in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top
of the page; use the header command in MS Word.)
Don't forget to give your essay a title - one that gives the reader some idea of what he's in for, and
includes the name of the author and title of the story you're writing about (for example, "Taking Care
of Grandma"). Skip two spaces and center it.
Then skip another two spaces and begin your essay.
Once you have printed your essay out, proofread it carefully. Then proofread it again. Make minor
corrections neatly in ink. If you find more than one or two errors, correct them and print it out again.
See the next page for a model of how your first page should look

20

21

Writing Assignment Guidelines and Expectations
In order for a paper to be accepted it must
Have a clear thesis statement,
Use MLA format and documentation,
Follow literary conventions,
Be organized effectively,
Use ample evidence and support from the primary text,
Be reasonable free of grammatical, mechanical, and spelling issues,
Use appropriate punctuation.
Avoid common issues:
Do not arbitrarily assign meaning.
Use quoted material effectively.
Remember that analysis is not plot summary.
Do not confuse central idea with conflict.
Submitting Papers
All papers must be turned in in hard copy form in the ACC folder. No emailed submissions will be
accepted.
Papers will be marked Accept, Edit, Revise, or Rewrite with appropriate comments. A and
B papers will only be marked Accept or Rewrite.
Students who have not turned in paper #4 by the withdraw deadline will be asked to withdraw from the class.
Due to the overwhelming number of papers that are often turned in on the withdraw deadline, those students
turning in paper #4 for the first time on this day may not get the paper back until the second class day. Since
this may jeopardize the students ability to turn in B and A papers by the end of the course, students are
strongly encouraged to turn in paper #4 before the withdraw deadline.
All papers will be kept by the teacher. Failure to turn in your folder at the end of the semester will
negatively affect your grade.

22

Gaga 1

23

Lady Gaga
ENGL 1302
Professor Stephens
Essay 5: Analysis
May 5, 2011

Persuasion and Pathos in Montville's "Requiem for a Super
Featherweight"

Leigh Montville's essay "Requiem for a Super Feather-weight"
tells the story of a young man whose life is cut short by a prizefight
gone terribly wrong. Montville, a writer for Sports Illustrated,
presents the events surrounding the death of 23-year-old Jimmy Garcia
as a narration of event (1). It is not immediately clear that the
author's purpose is persuasion, but as the story progresses and the
reader learns more about what happened to Garcia and the sort of person
he was, it becomes obvious that Montville's intent is to argue for the
abolition of boxing.
Montville's primary aim of persuasion becomes clear near the end
of the essay. He writes that the young man's condition after a title
fight at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas "brought easy calls for the
abolition of boxing," and adds that "[i]nstead of engaging in that
debate," everyone should go inside a hospital room to see the
consequences of the sport firsthand.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit,
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation
ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit
Gaga 2
24

esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint
occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia
deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
(ed. note: 225 words)

25

Instructions for Edit, Revision, and Rewrite

If I have marked your essay 'edit,' 'revise,' or 'rewrite,' make sure that you hand in your previous version
with the new one (if I ask for an edit and you make corrections on the original, of course, this does not apply). I cannot
accept revisions or rewrites unless you attach the original essay. Please note that I do not mark all typos, misspellings,
grammatical errors, etc. Rather, I will indicate general problems, mark some examples, and leave it to you to find and
correct the rest, so be sure that you correct all instances of a problem. If you do not understand the correction mark, talk
with me. If you are not sure what to do, come see me. I'll be glad to go over it with you. (You may also wish to visit the
tutoring lab.)
Be sure that you correct all errors. Otherwise, I will return the essay to you for further work.
If I marked your essay 'edit,' make changes neatly and carefully on the original copy. If I request a 'clean copy'
edit, please make the changes, print a new copy, and then hand both essays in together (stapled, please, with the new
version on top).
If I marked your essay 'revise,' note my comments and corrections, go through the essay carefully, make the
changes I have requested (being careful not to introduce new errors), and print a new copy. Staple the original to your
revision (again, new version on top) and hand them in together.
If the essay receives 'rewrite,' it's an indication that it suffers from serious problems too-frequent
mechanical errors, structural problems, etc. Note my written comments and corrections, talk with me about it, then put
the original aside and start over, making sure that you follow my instructions carefully.
When you make corrections and/or revisions, please follow these guidelines:
Correct misspelled words; do not simply delete the word or substitute a new one you happen to know how
to spell. Similarly, do not correct grammar errors, etc., by rewriting the passage to eliminate the error. For
example, if you have a problem with subject-verb agreement, make sure that you understand the problem,
and then correct it; do not revise the sentence to avoid the necessity of correcting the error.
If I write 'awk' (awkward), 'unclear,' or 'ungr' (ungrammatical) next to a sentence or passage, be sure that
you rewrite or revise it.
Avoid making new mistakes in the process of revision. Learn from your errors, and take that knowledge
forward into the next project.

26

If you have a question, do not hesitate to ask me for clarification. I also urge you to take advantage of the
expert help available in the ACC Tutoring Lab.
Finally, keep in mind that, in accordance with English Department policy, I cannot consider your next essay
until the previous one has been accepted.

27

How Many Pages is 1,000 Words?
Some students are concerned with the number of pages they are required to write in an
essay. These students are not really fond of writing articles. They want to complete an essay as
quickly as possible. But what if your teacher asks you to write an essay in 1000 words? You will be
asking how many pages is 1000 words should be produced?
You have to understand that essay writing is not all about the number of words or the number of
pages. The more important thing is the article has a specific goal of writing and it entices audience to
read it. The number of words and page requirements are simply guidelines for the class to use. These
are instructor based rules that he or she may need to test. If you are curious how 1000 words will fit
in an essay, let us give you some info about how many pages is 1000 words.
The number of pages of an essay will be influenced not by the number of words but by the
format and layout. One example is the spacing of the sentences. There are single spaced and double
spaced essays. Usually, a single spaced essay page will contain at least 500 words. This is a general
average. So if you have a double spaced essay, then there will be two pages per 500 words.
Increasing the number further will give you four pages in 1000 words.
Another factor to consider is the inclusion of miscellaneous pages. The number of pages will
increase if you will add a cover page, table of contents and bibliography page. You may also add an
illustration or diagram page. Now you know how many pages is 1000 words you can start formatting
your essay.

This article originally appeared on http://essay-blog.com/college-essays/how-many-pages-is-1000-words

28

29

English 1302
Course Outline

1) Unit One: Research Skills
a) Learning Outcomes: Upon successful completion of the lesson, the student will be able to write a series of
compositions in standard MLA format.
i) Develop the correct MLA format for noting reference materials.
ii) Employ direct quotes, paraphrases, and summaries, from sources for notes.
b) Learning Activities:
i) Classroom lecture/discussion
ii) Reading Assignments : Handouts
c) Unit Outline:
i) Review paper requirements
ii) Review MLA standards
2) Unit Two: Literary Analysis
a) Learning Outcomes: Upon successful completion of this unit, the student will use the skills developed to write
a series of short analytical compositions.
ii) Reading Assignments : Handouts
c) Unit Outline:
i) Discuss literary analysis and the terms associated with it
ii) Read examples of literary analysis from other students
iii) Read examples of literary analysis from professionals
3) Unit Three: The Short Story
a) Learning Outcomes: Upon successful completion of this unit, the student will
i) Explain the major characteristics of modern fiction as they apply to the short story.
ii) Write an effective 300 word expository essay analyzing one or more of the short stories studied,
demonstrating detailed understanding of the characteristics of short fiction as assigned.
ii) Reading Assignments
iii) Writing Assignments
c) Unit Outline:
i) Introduction to Short Story
(1) Plot
(2) Conflict
(3) Characterization
(4) Setting
(5) Point of View
(6) Symbolism
(7) Theme
ii) Analysis and interpretation of several short stories
iii) Short Story Exam (optional)
iv) Short Story Essay
v) The Stories
(1) Stories for Class Discussion
(a) Connell The Most Dangerous Game - Conflict
(b) Greene The Destructors - Setting
(c) Brush The Birthday Party - Conflict
(d) Cheever The Swimmer Point of View
(e) Faulkner A Rose for Emily - Symbolism
(f) Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper

30

(g) Gordimer Once Upon a Time
(h) Hauptmann - Bahnwrter Thiel - Characterization
(i) Joyce The Dead
(j) Joyce Eveline - Character
(k) Mansfield Miss Brill - Symbolism
(l) Marquez A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
(m) OConnor The Drunkard
(n) Salinger A Perfect Day for Bananafish
(o) Updike A&P
(2) Stories for Compositions
(a) Vonnegut - Harrison Bergeron
(b) Nolan - Memento Mori
(c) Kafka - Metamorphosis
(a) Baldwin - Sonnys Blues
(b) Twain - The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
(c) Cisneros - The House on Mango Street
(d) Jackson - The Lottery
(e) Hurst - The Scarlet Ibis
(f) O'Brien - The Things They Carried
(g) Bradbury - The Utterly Perfect Murder
(h) Hawthorne - Young Goodman Brown
2) Unit Four: The Novel
i) Explore the differences and similarities of the two types of narrative fictionthe short story and the
novel.
ii) Explain the major elements of fiction and how they apply to the novel.
b) Write an effective 300 word expository essay analyzing the novel read in class demonstrating understanding of
the characteristics of the novel form.
c) Learning Activities:
i) Classroom lecture/Discussion
d) Unit Outline:
i) Review of fictional elements and narrative
ii) Discussion of differences and similarities of the short story and the novel
iii) In-class discussion and analysis of the novel selected by the instructor or by the student with instructor
approval
iv) In-class exam (optional)
v) Novel essay
3) Unit Five: Drama
i) Explain the major elements of drama.
ii) Write an effective 300 word expository essay analyzing the drama discussed in class.
ii) Reading assignment: Macbeth
c) Unit Outline:
i) An introduction to drama
(1) The major elements of drama
(a) Plot
(b) Conflict
(c) Characterization
(d) Dialogue
(e) Setting

31

(f) Theme
(g) Spectacle
(2) A brief history of the two major types of drama
(a) Comedy
(b) Tragedy
(c) In-class discussion and interpretation of at least one drama
(d) Drama exam (optional)
(e) Drama essay English
ii) The Play Macbeth by William Shakespeare
4) Unit Six: Poetry
a) Unit Outcomes: Upon successful completion of this unit, the student will
i) Be able to differentiate between poetry and non-poetry
ii) Explain the major characteristics of poetry as well as the major types of poetry.
iii) Analyze and interpret a variety of poems.
iv) Write and effective 300 word expository essay interpreting a poem selected by the instructor.
c) Unit Outline:
i) Introduction to Poetry
(1) The major characteristics of poetry
(a) Theme
(b) Word choice
(c) Imagery and figurative language
(d) Sound
(2) The forms of poetry
(a) Closed forms
(b) Open forms
(c) In-class discussion of a variety of selected poems
(d) In-class exam (optional)
(e) Poetry essay

32

33

Composition Assignments
Paper #1: Conflict and Setting
1. Choose from one of the following stories: The Scarlet Ibis or Harrison Bergeron.
2. Write a well-developed analytical essay focusing on either conflict or setting. Clearly identify the central idea of
the story in the thesis statement. Explain what the conflict or the setting contributes to the central idea and
support this conclusion with examples from the story. You may choose to analyze both elements. If you do so,
you must describe their relationship to each other as well as their contribution to the central idea.
Minimum length: 300 words

Paper #2: Character and Point of View
1. Choose from one of the following short stories: The Utterly Perfect Murder, The House on Mango
Street, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, or Memento Mori.
2. Write a well-developed analytical essay focusing on either character or point of view. Clearly identify the central
idea of the story in the thesis statement. Explain what the characterization or the point of view contributes to
the central idea and support this conclusion with examples from the story. You may choose to analyze both
elements. If you do so, you must describe their relationship to each other as well as their contribution to the
central idea.

Paper #3: Language and Tone
1. Choose from one of the following short stories: The Lottery or The Things They Carried.
2. Write a well-developed analytical essay focusing on either language or tone. Clearly identify the central idea of
the story in the thesis statement. Explain what the language or the tone contributes to the central idea and
support this conclusion with examples from the story. You may choose to analyze both elements. If you do so,
you must describe their relationship to each other as well as their contribution to the central idea.

34

Paper #4: Analysis of all seven elements
1. Choose from one of the following short stories: Metamorphosis, Sonnys Blues, or Young Goodman
Brown.
2. Write a well-developed analytical essay that demonstrates how the conflict, setting, characterization, point of
view, language, and tone each contributes to the central idea (stated in the thesis statement). Use examples
from the story to support your discussion of each element. Include at least one quote or paraphrase of a
professional criticism to support your conclusions.
3. Include a works cited (on a separate page) with all of the primary and secondary sources listed in MLA format.
Parenthetical citations must be used for all secondary sources.

B Paper: Author Study
Write a well-developed analytical essay that focuses on how an author uses an element in different short stories.
Compare and contrast the uses of the element in different stories by the same author. Identify commonalities that mark
an authors style and support with examples from the stories. Choices for author studies will be given in April.
Minimum length: 1000 words.

A Paper: Compare and Contrast
Write a well-developed analytical essay that compares and contrasts thematic elements of two stories. In addition to the
analysis and comparison of both central ideas, choose at least three additional elements for comparison. Choices for
story pairs will be given in April.

35

English 1302
First Day of Class
Exit Pass and Syllabus Contract

1. What is your professors email address? ____________________________________________________

2. How must all papers be formatted? _______________________________________________________

3. How many papers must be ultimately be accepted in order to receive an A in the class?______________

4. When is the last day to turn in paper #4 for the first time?______________________________________

5. What percentage of preparation and participation checkmarks must you have in order to be eligible to write an A
paper? ____________

I ___________________________________________(print your name) acknowledge that I have read the syllabus,
and I understand the expectations of the class. I understand the grading system and recognize the importance of turning
in my work in a timely manner in order to receive the grade I want. I also understand the importance of arriving to class
on time and prepared. According to ACC policy, there are no excused absences. If you must be gone for a school
activity, you are still responsible for all assignments for that class. You will be dropped for excessive absences.

___________________________________________________________________ ________________
Signature Date

Optional:

________________________________________________________________________
Email Address

At this time, the grade that I am working towards in this class is a(n) _____________

Things you should know about me. (Use other side if desired).

36

37

III. Literary Analysis and
Composition
Essential Questions
Must a story have a moral, heroes, and villains?
How is the point of view of the writer and his/her experience of the world expressed in written work?
How do the arts contribute to a quality life?
How is self reflection useful in the writing process?
How do skills and various communication forms empower individuals to clarify their points of view?
How can literary elements be combined to create an original work?
How is communication used to portray different perspectives?
How does one support one's personal point of view and validate ideas through communication?
What methods can be employed to gather, screen, and organize for effective communication?
How does effective communication of different perspectives build understanding?
How do people select and adapt communication forms for a specific audience?
How does using and understanding conventions empower individuals?
Fair Use
Some material contained herein is used according to the Fair Use provision of the United States
Copyight Laws: US Code TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 > 107. Notwithstanding the provisions of
sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in
copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as
criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use),
scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

Copyright 2009-2011 Jimmy C. Stephens. All Rights Reserved. Materials obtained from Internet sources are so cited.

38

Objectives

1. Students will understand the primary and secondary conflict in The Most Dangerous Game?
2. Students will understand the ways in which an author employs tension between the narrator's tone and the story's
setting to depict wanton behavior in Greenes The Destructors
3. Students will analyze Marquezs use of point of view, fantasy, and imagery in A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings.
4. Students will understand the techniques a short story author can employ in character development in Gordimers
Once upon a Time.
5. Students will understand how an Cheevers The Swimmer conveys a characters physicality, personality, life
history, and values.
6. Students will understand how John Updike's use of stylistic devices such as point of view, figurative language,
and irony effectively develop the character of Sammy in The A&P.
7. Students will demonstrate an understanding of how the narration of Salingers A Perfect Day for Bananafish
affects its meaning and conveys an authors attitudes.
8. Students will understand how an author uses plot to evoke emotional responses from the reader, and relies on plot
to convey a theme in a brief time in Mansfields Miss Brill.
9. Students will understand how Faulkner uses plot structure in "A Rose for Emily" to create suspense?
10. Students will understand the importance of plot sequence and how it can render a story compelling to the reader
in OConnors The Drunkard
11. Students will understand the purpose behind an author's use of point of view, plot, symbolism, metaphor, and
characterization in order to communicate a theme in Joyces Eveline.

39

HOLD HARMLESS AGREEMENT
FOR USE OF THE MATERIAL CONTAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT

1. In consideration for receiving permission to use the material provided herein, I hereby RELEASE, WAIVE,
DISCHARGE AND COVENANT NOT TO SUE, Jimmy Stephens, A, The State of Texas, their officers, agents,
servants, or employees (hereinafter referred to as RELEASEES) from any and all liability, claims, demands, actions
and causes of action whatsoever arising out of or related to any loss, damage, or injury, including death, that may be
sustained by me, or any of the property belonging to me, WHETHER CAUSED BY THE NEGLIGENCE OF THE
RELEASEES, or otherwise, as a result of use of this material

2. I further hereby AGREE TO INDEMNIFY AND HOLD HARMLESS the RELEASEES from any loss, liability,
damage or costs, including court costs and attorney fees, that they may incur due to my use of said document,
WHETHER CAUSED BY NEGLIGENCE OF RELEASEES or otherwise.

4. It is my express intent that this Waiver of Liability and Hold Harmless Agreement shall bind the members of my
family and spouse, if I am alive, and my heirs, assigns and personal representative, if I am deceased, and shall be
deemed as a RELEASE, WAIVER, DISCHARGE AND COVENANT NOT TO SUE the above-named
RELEASEES. I hereby further agree that this Waiver of Liability and Hold Harmless Agreement shall be construed
in accordance with the laws of the State of Texas.

6. IN USING THIS DOCUMENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO PHOTOCOPYING AND ELECTRONIC
TRANSMISSION, I ACKNOWLEDGE AND REPRESENT THAT I have read the foregoing Waiver of Liability
and Hold Harmless Agreement, understand it. I am at least eighteen (18) years of age and fully competent; and I
execute this Release for full, adequate and complete consideration fully intending to be bound by same.

License
THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS CREATIVE COMMONS
PUBLIC LICENSE ("CCPL" OR "LICENSE"). THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR
OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS
LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT LAW IS PROHIBITED.
BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO BE
BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. TO THE EXTENT THIS LICENSE MAY BE CONSIDERED TO
BE A CONTRACT, THE LICENSOR GRANTS YOU THE RIGHTS CONTAINED HERE IN
CONSIDERATION OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF SUCH TERMS AND CONDITIONS.
1. Definitions
a. "Adaptation" means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as
a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic
work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which
the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the
original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the
purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or
phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be
considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.
b. "Collection" means a collection of literary or artistic works, such as encyclopedias and anthologies, or
performances, phonograms or broadcasts, or other works or subject matter other than works listed in
Section 1(g) below, which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute
intellectual creations, in which the Work is included in its entirety in unmodified form along with one or
more other contributions, each constituting separate and independent works in themselves, which together
are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an
Adaptation (as defined above) for the purposes of this License.

40

c. "Distribute" means to make available to the public the original and copies of the Work or Adaptation, as
appropriate, through sale or other transfer of ownership.
d. "License Elements" means the following high-level license attributes as selected by Licensor and indicated
in the title of this License: Attribution, Noncommercial, ShareAlike.
e. "Licensor" means the individual, individuals, entity or entities that offer(s) the Work under the terms of this
License.
f. "Original Author" means, in the case of a literary or artistic work, the individual, individuals, entity or
entities who created the Work or if no individual or entity can be identified, the publisher; and in addition
(i) in the case of a performance the actors, singers, musicians, dancers, and other persons who act, sing,
deliver, declaim, play in, interpret or otherwise perform literary or artistic works or expressions of folklore;
(ii) in the case of a phonogram the producer being the person or legal entity who first fixes the sounds of a
performance or other sounds; and, (iii) in the case of broadcasts, the organization that transmits the
broadcast.
g. "Work" means the literary and/or artistic work offered under the terms of this License including without
limitation any production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form
of its expression including digital form, such as a book, pamphlet and other writing; a lecture, address,
sermon or other work of the same nature; a dramatic or dramatico-musical work; a choreographic work or
entertainment in dumb show; a musical composition with or without words; a cinematographic work to
which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to cinematography; a work of drawing,
painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving or lithography; a photographic work to which are assimilated
works expressed by a process analogous to photography; a work of applied art; an illustration, map, plan,
sketch or three-dimensional work relative to geography, topography, architecture or science; a
performance; a broadcast; a phonogram; a compilation of data to the extent it is protected as a
copyrightable work; or a work performed by a variety or circus performer to the extent it is not otherwise
considered a literary or artistic work.
h. "You" means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License who has not previously violated
the terms of this License with respect to the Work, or who has received express permission from the
Licensor to exercise rights under this License despite a previous violation.
i. "Publicly Perform" means to perform public recitations of the Work and to communicate to the public those
public recitations, by any means or process, including by wire or wireless means or public digital
performances; to make available to the public Works in such a way that members of the public may access
these Works from a place and at a place individually chosen by them; to perform the Work to the public by
any means or process and the communication to the public of the performances of the Work, including by
public digital performance; to broadcast and rebroadcast the Work by any means including signs, sounds or
images.
j. "Reproduce" means to make copies of the Work by any means including without limitation by sound or
visual recordings and the right of fixation and reproducing fixations of the Work, including storage of a
protected performance or phonogram in digital form or other electronic medium.
2. Fair Dealing Rights. Nothing in this License is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any uses free from copyright
or rights arising from limitations or exceptions that are provided for in connection with the copyright protection
under copyright law or other applicable laws.
3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide,
royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in
the Work as stated below:
a. to Reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Work
as incorporated in the Collections;
b. to create and Reproduce Adaptations provided that any such Adaptation, including any translation in any
medium, takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to
the original Work. For example, a translation could be marked "The original work was translated from
English to Spanish," or a modification could indicate "The original work has been modified.";
c. to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,
d. to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

41

The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above
rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media
and formats. Subject to Section 8(f), all rights not expressly granted by Licensor are hereby reserved, including but
not limited to the rights described in Section 4(e).
4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following
restrictions:
a. You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of this License. You must include a
copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You
Distribute or Publicly Perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms
of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient
under the terms of the License. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that
refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties with every copy of the Work You Distribute or
Publicly Perform. When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You may not impose any effective
technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise
the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. This Section 4(a) applies to the Work as
incorporated in a Collection, but this does not require the Collection apart from the Work itself to be made
subject to the terms of this License. If You create a Collection, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to
the extent practicable, remove from the Collection any credit as required by Section 4(d), as requested. If
You create an Adaptation, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from
the Adaptation any credit as required by Section 4(d), as requested.
b. You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under: (i) the terms of this License; (ii) a later
version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons
jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this
License (e.g., Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US) ("Applicable License"). You must include a
copy of, or the URI, for Applicable License with every copy of each Adaptation You Distribute or Publicly
Perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Adaptation that restrict the terms of the Applicable
License or the ability of the recipient of the Adaptation to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under
the terms of the Applicable License. You must keep intact all notices that refer to the Applicable License
and to the disclaimer of warranties with every copy of the Work as included in the Adaptation You
Distribute or Publicly Perform. When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Adaptation, You may not
impose any effective technological measures on the Adaptation that restrict the ability of a recipient of the
Adaptation from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the Applicable
License. This Section 4(b) applies to the Adaptation as incorporated in a Collection, but this does not
require the Collection apart from the Adaptation itself to be made subject to the terms of the Applicable
License.
c. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily
intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of
the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered
to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided
there is no payment of any monetary compensation in con-nection with the exchange of copyrighted works.
d. If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a
request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide,
reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if
applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties
(e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's
copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the
title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor
specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing
information for the Work; and, (iv) consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit
identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original
Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section
4(d) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or

42

Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation
or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for
the other contributing authors. For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this
Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this
License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or
endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your
use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor
and/or Attribution Parties.
e. For the avoidance of doubt:
i. Non-waivable Compulsory License Schemes. In those jurisdictions in which the right to collect
royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme cannot be waived, the Licensor
reserves the exclusive right to collect such royalties for any exercise by You of the rights granted
under this License;
ii. Waivable Compulsory License Schemes. In those jurisdictions in which the right to collect
royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme can be waived, the Licensor
reserves the exclusive right to collect such royalties for any exercise by You of the rights granted
under this License if Your exercise of such rights is for a purpose or use which is otherwise than
noncommercial as permitted under Section 4(c) and otherwise waives the right to collect royalties
through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme; and,
iii. Voluntary License Schemes. The Licensor reserves the right to collect royalties, whether
individually or, in the event that the Licensor is a member of a collecting society that administers
voluntary licensing schemes, via that society, from any exercise by You of the rights granted
under this License that is for a purpose or use which is otherwise than noncommercial as permitted
under Section 4(c).
f. Except as otherwise agreed in writing by the Licensor or as may be otherwise permitted by applicable law,
if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or
Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work
which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation. Licensor agrees that in those
jurisdictions (e.g. Japan), in which any exercise of the right granted in Section 3(b) of this License (the
right to make Adaptations) would be deemed to be a distortion, mutilation, modification or other
derogatory action prejudicial to the Original Author's honor and reputation, the Licensor will waive or not
assert, as appropriate, this Section, to the fullest extent permitted by the applicable national law, to enable
You to reasonably exercise Your right under Section 3(b) of this License (right to make Adaptations) but
not otherwise.
5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer
UNLESS OTHERWISE MUTUALLY AGREED TO BY THE PARTIES IN WRITING AND TO THE FULLEST
EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, LICENSOR OFFERS THE WORK AS-IS AND MAKES NO
REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE WORK, EXPRESS, IMPLIED,
STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE,
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR THE
ABSENCE OF LATENT OR OTHER DEFECTS, ACCURACY, OR THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE OF
ERRORS, WHETHER OR NOT DISCOVERABLE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE
EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO THIS EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.
6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT
WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL,
CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE
USE OF THE WORK, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGES.
7. Termination
This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of
this License. Individuals or entities who have received Adaptations or Collections from You under this License,

43

however, will not have their licenses terminated provided such individuals or entities remain in full compliance with
those licenses. Sections 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 will survive any termination of this License.
Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable
copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different
license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to
withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this
License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above.
8. Miscellaneous
a. Each time You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work or a Collection, the Licensor offers to the recipient
a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.
b. Each time You Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation, Licensor offers to the recipient a license to
the original Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.
c. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the
validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the
parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such
provision valid and enforceable.
d. No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such
waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent.
e. This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here.
There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here.
Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You.
This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You.
f. The rights granted under, and the subject matter referenced, in this License were drafted utilizing the
terminology of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (as amended on
September 28, 1979), the Rome Convention of 1961, the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996, the WIPO
Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 1996 and the Universal Copyright Convention (as revised on July
24, 1971). These rights and subject matter take effect in the relevant jurisdiction in which the License terms
are sought to be enforced according to the corresponding provisions of the implementation of those treaty
provisions in the applicable national law. If the standard suite of rights granted under applicable copyright
law includes additional rights not granted under this License, such additional rights are deemed to be
included in the License; this License is not intended to restrict the license of any rights under applicable
law.

44

45

NCTE/IRA Standards
1 - Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the
cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society
and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary
works.
2 - Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many
dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.
3 - Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their
prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts,
their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence,
sentence structure, context, graphics).
4- Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They
gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to
communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.
5- Students develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures,
ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.
6- Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
7 - Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment,
persuasion, and the exchange of information).

46

47

TEKS Covered In This Unit

110.45. English IV (One Credit).
(b) Knowledge and skills.
(1) Writing/purposes. The student writes in a
variety of forms.
The student is expected to:
(A) write in a variety of forms with an emphasis on literary forms
such as fiction, poetry, drama, and media scripts;
(B) draw upon the distinguishing characteristics of written forms
such as essays, scientific reports, speeches, and memoranda to write
effectively in each form;
(C) write in a voice and style appropriate to audience and purpose;
(D) employ literary devices to enhance style and voice;
(E) employ precise language to communicate ideas clearly and
concisely; and
(F) organize ideas in writing to ensure coherence, logical
progression, and support for ideas.
(2) Writing/writing processes. The student uses
recursive writing processes when appropriate.
(A) use prewriting strategies to generate ideas, develop voice, and
plan;
(B) develop drafts both independently and collaboratively by
organizing content such as paragraphing and outlining and by
refining style to suit occasion, audience, and purpose;
(C) use vocabulary, organization, and rhetorical devices appropriate
to audience and purpose;
(D) use varied sentence structure to express meanings and achieve
desired effect;
(E) revise drafts by rethinking content organization and style to
better accomplish the task;
(F) use effective sequences and transitions to achieve coherence and
meaning;
(G) use technology for aspects of creating, revising, editing, and
publishing texts; and

48

(H) refine selected pieces to publish for general and specific
audiences.
(3)
Writing/grammar/usage/conventions/spelling.
The student relies increasingly on the
conventions and mechanics of written English,
including the rules of usage and grammar, to
write clearly and effectively.
(A) produce legible work that shows accurate spelling and correct
use of the conventions of punctuation and capitalization such as
italics and ellipses;
(B) demonstrate control over grammatical elements such as subject-
verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, verb forms, and
parallelism;
(C) compose increasingly more involved sentences that contain
gerunds, participles, and infinitives in their various functions;
(D) produce error-free writing in the final draft; and
(E) use a manual of style such as Modern Language Association
(MLA), American Psychological Association (APA), and The
Chicago Manual of Style (CMS).
(4) Writing/inquiry/research. The student uses
writing as a tool for learning and research.
(A) use writing to formulate questions, refine topics, and clarify
ideas;
(B) use writing to discover, record, review, and learn;
(C) use writing to organize and support what is known and what
needs to be learned about a topic;
(D) compile information from primary and secondary sources using
available technology;
(E) organize notes from multiple sources in useful and informing
ways such as graphics, conceptual maps, and learning logs;
(F) link related information and ideas from a variety of sources;
(G) compile written ideas and representations into reports,
summaries, or other formats and draw conclusions; and
(H) use writing as a tool for reflection, exploration, learning,
problem solving, and personal growth.
(5) Writing/analysis. The student
communicates with writers inside and outside
the classroom, including writers who represent

49

diverse cultures and fields.
(A) analyze strategies that writers in different fields use to compose;
(B) correspond with other writers electronically and in conventional
ways;
(C) collaborate with other writers; and
(D) recognize how writers represent and reveal their cultures and
traditions in texts.
(6) Writing/evaluation. The student evaluates
his/her own writing and the writings of others.
(A) evaluate how well writing achieves its purposes and engage in
conversations with peers and the teacher about aspects of his/her
own writing and the writings of others;
(B) analyze and discuss published pieces as writing models and
apply criteria developed by self and others to evaluate writing; and
(C) accumulate and review his/her own written work to determine
its strengths and weaknesses and to set his/her own goals as a
writer.
(7) Reading/word identification/vocabulary
development. The student acquires an extensive
vocabulary through reading and systematic
word study.
(A) expand vocabulary through wide reading, listening, and
discussing;
(B) rely on context to determine meanings of words and phrases
such as figurative language, idioms, multiple meaning words, and
technical vocabulary;
(C) apply meanings of prefixes, roots, and suffixes in order to
comprehend;
(D) research word origins as an aid to understanding meanings,
derivations, and spellings as well as influences on the English
language;
(E) use reference material such as glossary, dictionary, thesaurus,
and available technology to determine precise meanings and usage;
(F) discriminate between denotative and connotative meanings and
interpret the connotative power of words; and
(G) read and understand analogies.
(8) Reading/comprehension. The student The student is expected to:

50

comprehends selections using a variety of
strategies.
(A) establish and adjust purpose for reading such as to find out, to
understand, to interpret, to enjoy, and to solve problems;
(B) draw upon his/her own background to provide connection to
texts;
(C) monitor his/her own reading strategies and modify when
necessary;
(E) analyze text structures such as compare/contrast, cause/effect,
and chronological order for how they influence understanding;
(F) produce summaries of texts by identifying main idea and
supporting detail;
(G) draw inferences and support them with textual evidence and
experience;
(H) use study strategies such as note taking, outlining, and using
study-guide questions to better understand texts; and
(I) read silently with comprehension for a sustained period of time.
(9) Reading/variety of texts. The student reads
extensively and intensively for different
purposes in varied sources, including British
literature, in increasingly demanding texts.
(A) read to be entertained, to appreciate a writer's craft, to be
informed, to take action, and to discover models to use in his/her
own writing;
(B) read in varied sources such as diaries, journals, textbooks, maps,
newspapers, letters, speeches, memoranda, electronic texts, and
other media;
(C) read British and other world literature, including classic and
contemporary works; and
(D) interpret the possible influences of the historical context on a
literary work.
(10) Reading/culture. The student reads widely,
including British literature, to increase
knowledge of his/her own culture, the culture
of others, and the common elements across
culture.
(A) recognize distinctive and shared characteristics of cultures
through reading;
(B) compare text events with his/her own and other readers'
experiences; and
(C) recognize and discuss themes and connections that cross

51

cultures.
(11) Reading/literary response. The student
expresses and supports responses to various
types of texts.
(A) respond to informational and aesthetic elements in texts such as
discussions, journal entries, oral interpretations, enactments, and
graphic displays;
(B) use elements of text to defend, clarify, and negotiate responses
and interpretations;
(C) analyze written reviews of literature, film, and performance to
compare with his/her own responses; and
(D) evaluate text through critical analysis.
(12) Reading/literary concepts. The student
analyzes literary elements for their contributions
to meaning in literary texts.
(A) compare and contrast elements of texts such as themes,
conflicts, and allusions both within and across texts;
(B) propose and provide examples of themes that cross texts;
(C) analyze relevance of setting and time frame to text's meaning;
(D) describe the development of plot and identify conflicts and how
they are addressed and resolved;
(E) analyze the melodies of literary language, including its use of
evocative words and rhythms;
(F) connect literature to historical contexts, current events, and
his/her own experiences; and
(G) understand literary forms and terms such as author, drama,
biography, autobiography, myth, tall tale, dialogue, tragedy and
comedy, structure in poetry, epic, ballad, protagonist, antagonist,
paradox, analogy, dialect, and comic relief as appropriate to the
selections being read.
(13) Reading/analysis/evaluation. The student
reads critically to evaluate texts and the
authority of sources.
(A) analyze the characteristics of clear text such as conciseness,
correctness, and completeness;
(B) evaluate the credibility of information sources, including how
the writer's motivation may affect that credibility;
(C) recognize logical, deceptive, and/or faulty modes of persuasion

52

in text;
(D) apply modes of reasoning such as induction and deduction to
think critically;
(E) describe how a writer's motivation, stance, or position may
affect text credibility, structure, and tone; and
(F) analyze aspects of texts such as patterns of organization and
choice of language for their effect on audiences.
(14) Reading/inquiry/research. The student
uses reading and research skills to develop self-
selected topics.
(A) generate relevant, interesting, and researchable questions;
(B) locate appropriate print and non-print information using text
and technical resources, including databases and the Internet;
(C) use text organizers such as overviews, headings, and graphic
features to locate and categorize information;
(D) evaluate the credibility of information sources and their
appropriateness for varied needs;
(E) organize and record new information in systematic ways such as
notes, charts, and graphic organizers;
(F) produce research projects and reports in varying forms for
audiences; and
(G) draw relevant questions for further study from the research
findings or conclusions.
(15) Listening/speaking/critical listening. The
student listens attentively for a variety of
purposes.
(A) demonstrate proficiency in each aspect of the listening process
such as focusing attention, interpreting, and responding;
(B) use effective strategies for listening such as preparing for
listening, identifying the types of listening, and adopting appropriate
strategies;
(C) demonstrate proficiency in critical, empathic, appreciative, and
reflective listening;
(D) use effective strategies to evaluate his/her own listening such as
asking questions for clarification, comparing and contrasting
interpretations with those of others, and researching points of

53

interest or contention; and
(E) use effective listening to provide appropriate feedback in a
variety of situations such as conversations and discussions and
informative, persuasive, or artistic presentations.
(16) Listening/speaking/purposes. The student
speaks clearly and effectively for a variety of
purposes.
(A) use conventions of oral language effectively, including word
choice, grammar, and diction;
(B) use informal, standard, and technical English to meet demands
of occasion, audience, and task;
(C) respond appropriately to the opinions and views of others;
(D) adopt verbal and nonverbal strategies to accommodate needs of
the listener and occasion;
(E) ask clear questions for a variety of purposes and respond
appropriately to the questions of others;
(F) make relevant contributions in conversations and discussions;
(G) express and defend a point of view using precise language and
appropriate detail; and
(H) speak responsibly to present accurate, truthful, and ethical
messages.
(17) Listening/speaking/presentations. The
student prepares, organizes, and presents oral
messages.
(A) present clear thesis statements and claims;
(B) support major thesis with logical points or arguments;
(C) choose valid evidence or proofs to support claims;
(D) use effective appeals to support points, claims, or arguments;
(E) use language and rhetorical strategies skillfully in informative
and persuasive messages;
(F) analyze purpose, audience, and occasion to choose effective
verbal and nonverbal strategies for presenting messages and
performances;
(G) interpret literary texts such as telling stories, and interpreting

54

scenes from narrative or dramatic texts or poems; and
(H) use feedback to judge effectiveness in communicating and
setting goals for future presentations.
(18) Listening/speaking/evaluation. The
student evaluates and critiques oral
presentations and performances.
(A) apply valid criteria to analyze, evaluate, and critique informative
and persuasive messages;
(B) apply valid criteria to analyze, evaluate, and critique literary
performances;
(C) use praise and suggestions of others to improve his/her own
communication; and
(D) identify and analyze the effect of artistic elements within literary
texts such as character development, rhyme, imagery, and language.

(20) Viewing/representing/analysis. The
student analyzes and critiques the significance
of visual representations.
(A) investigate the source of a media presentation or production
such as who made it and why it was made;
(B) deconstruct media to get the main idea of the message's content;
(C) evaluate and critique the persuasive techniques of media
messages such as glittering generalities, logical fallacies, and
symbols;
(D) recognize how visual and sound techniques or design convey
messages in media such as special effects, editing, camera angles,
reaction shots, sequencing, and music;
(E) recognize genres such as nightly news, newsmagazines, and
documentaries and identify the unique properties of each; and
(F) compare, contrast, and critique various media coverage of the
same event such as in newspapers, television, and on the Internet.

55

IV. Literary Analysis: Pre-Assessment

56

57

The Prose Passage Essay
Timed Writing Exam (40 Min.)
In the following passage from the short story "The Dead," James Joyce presents an insight into the character of
Gabriel. Write a well-organized essay in which you discuss various aspects of Gabriel's character that Joyce
reveals to the reader and to Gabriel himself. Refer to such techniques and devices as imagery, point of view,
motif, diction, and syntax.
_______________________________________

The Dead
By James Joyce
She was fast asleep.
Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth,
listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained
him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he
and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he
thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered
his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer
the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.
Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes.
A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its
side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from
his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure
of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick
Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the
Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The
blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him
how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame
and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

58

59

An Analysis of James Joyce's Short Story The Dead: Loving and Losing
Adapted from: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/39900/an_analysis_of_james_joyces_short_story.html?cat=38

At first glance, James Joyces The Dead appears to be a story about the annual Christmas party thrown by the Morkan
sisters and their niece, Mary Jane. It goes into detail about several of the guests in attendance and describes the
wonderful evening they all had, including singing, dancing, and a feast fit for a king. But when examining the story more
closely, it becomes evident that there is more to this account then just that on the surface. The Dead is a story about
love, lost loves, and the inability to forget those who have been loved and lost.
Although one might think the Morkans are at the center of the story, hosting their yearly get together, The Dead actually
revolves around Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. At the beginning of the party, Gabriel and Gretta appear to be a very happy
couple, laughing and joking about goloshes. Gabriel loves Gretta very much; his love is clearly shown when he rents a
hotel room for the two of them following the party. Gabriel worried that if they traveled home directly after the party
Gretta might become ill from the extreme cold weather. He loves her deeply and is more concerned with her health than
getting home and back to his children quickly. Throughout the dinner Gretta reciprocates the love, until something
suddenly changes her attitude for the night.
As the party was winding down, Gabriel was looking forward to a romantic night with his wife. While preparing to leave,
he noticed her leaning on the banister, transfixed by a song Mr. DArcy was singing in the adjacent room. The song, The
Lass of Aughrim, destroyed Grettas happy-go-lucky attitude and left her in a solemn state. Gabriel notices a change in
his wifes behavior, but he isnt able to figure out what the problem is. Gabriel is certain that there is something is
bothering his wife as they are settling into their hotel room. He pressures her to tell him what is on her mind. She finally
reveals to him that the song Mr. DArcy sung upset her, because it reminded her of a boy from her past, Michael Furey.
He was Grettas first love, and had died for her when he was only seventeen years old. Its clear from her hysterical
sobbing that Gretta has still not come to terms with losing her first love.
During his dinner table speech, Gabriel declares that although people may have sad memories from the past, you must
get over them and live for today and for the future. He says:
There are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of
youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here to-night. Our path through life is strewn with many such

60

sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our
work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our
strenuous endeavours.
Grettas reaction later that evening to her memories of Michael proves Gabriel wrong. Gabriel finally realizes that you
can never forget lost loves, and this upsets him. He realizes he was not Grettas first love and she will always hold the
memories of another man within her heart. He is also made aware that he has never felt true, deep love; the kind of love
that Gretta saw in Michaels eyes when he was willing to die for her. He knows that he has never experienced love like
this, and his life now seems empty without it.
Gabriel also realizes that he doesnt know his wife well at all, having been married to her for years and never hearing the
story of Michael Furey before. He has been selfish and self centered his whole life, only caring about himself. This
behavior can be seen in the beginning of the story, when Gabriel upsets Lily with his question about an upcoming
marriage. Gabriel doesnt think twice before speaking about whether or not his words might hurt Lily. He ends up
offending her and he doesnt even know what he has done wrong. This selfishness carried over to his own marriage. In
the years that he has been with Gretta, Gabriel never even thought to ask her about any past loves. Then he seems
surprised to find out she had been involved with a boy before meeting him. Gabriel should take other people into
account and not just focus on himself. He now realizes thisbut it took the dead Michael Furey to teach him this
lesson.
If one thing is to be realized from this short story, it should be that love is hard to come by. When two people are truly,
madly, and deeply in love, they must embrace it while they still have the opportunity. If the opportunity if passed up, it
might be lost forever. And even if a replacement is found, the first true love will never be forgotten.

61

The Prose Passage Essay
The Dead Discussion

WRITING THE OPENING PARAGRAPH
Your opening statement is the one that sets the tone of your essay and possibly raises the expectations of the reader.
Spend time on your first paragraph to maximize your score.
Make certain that your topic is very clear. This reinforces the idea that you fully understand what is expected of you and
what you will communicate to the reader. Generally, identify both the text and its author in this first paragraph.
A suggested approach is to relate a direct quotation from the passage to the topic.
Tip: Consider the "philosophy of firsts." It is a crucial strategy to spend focused time on the first part of the question and on the first
paragraph of the essay because:
1. It establishes the direction and tone of your essay.
2. It gives you the guidelines for what to develop in your essay.
3. It connects you to the reader.
If you focus on the beginning, the rest will fall into place. A wonderful thing happens after much practice, highlighting,
and note-taking. Your mind starts to focus automatically. It is the winning edge that can take an average essay and raise it
to a higher level.
Highlight these points to see if you've done them. You may be surprised at what is actually there.
Have you included author and title?
Have you addressed the character of Gabriel?
Have you specifically mentioned the techniques you will refer to in your essay?

Here are four sample opening paragraphs that address all of the criteria:
A. In "The Dead" by James Joyce, the character Gabriel is revealed through diction, point of view, and imagery as
he watches his wife sleep.

62

B. Poor Gabriel! Who would have thought he knew so little about himself and his life. And yet, in "The Dead,"
James Joyce, through diction, point of view, and imagery, makes it clear to the reader and to Gabriel that there
is much to reveal about his character.
C. "Yes, yes: this would happen very soon." And, yes, very soon the reader of the excerpt from Joyce's "The
Dead" gets to know the character of Gabriel. Through diction, point of view, and imagery, we are introduced
to Gabriel and what he thinks of himself.
D. "The Dead." How apt a title. James Joyce turns his reader into a fly on the wall as Gabriel is about to realize the
many losses in his life. Death pervades the passage, from his sleeping wife to his dying aunt.
Each of these opening paragraphs is an acceptable beginning to an Literature exam essay. Note what each of these
paragraphs has:
Each has identified the title and author.
Each has stated which technique/devices will be used.
Each has stated the purpose of analyzing these techniques/devices.
Now, note what is different about each opening paragraph.
Sample A restates the question without anything extra. It is to the point, so much so that it does nothing more than
repeat the question. It's correct, but it does not really pique the reader's interest. (Use this type of opening if you feel
unsure of or uncomfortable with the prompt.)
Sample B reveals the writer's attitude toward the subject. The writer has already determined that Gabriel is flawed and
indicates an under-standing of how Gabriel's character is revealed in the passage.
Sample C, with its direct quotation, places the reader immediately into the passage. The reader quickly begins to hear the
writer's voice through his or her choice of words (diction).
Sample D, at first glance, reveals a mature, confident writer who is not afraid to imply the prompt's criteria.
Note: There are many other types of opening paragraphs that could do the job as well. The paragraphs above are just a
few samples.
Into which of the above samples would you classify your opening paragraph?

WRITING THE BODY OF THE PROSE PASSAGE ESSAY

63

When you write the body of your essay, take only 1520 minutes. Time yourself and try your best to finish within that
time frame.
What should I include in the body of the prose passage essay?
1. Obviously, this is where you present your interpretation and the points you wish to make that are related to the
prompt.
2. Use specific references and details from the passage.
a. Don't always paraphrase the original; refer directly to it.
b. Place quotation marks around those words and phrases that you extract from the passage.
3. Use "connective tissue" in your essay to establish adherence to the question.
a. Use the repetition of key ideas from your opening paragraph.
b. Try using "echo words" (i.e., synonyms, such as death/loss/passing or
character/persona/personality).
c. Create transitions from one paragraph to the next.
To understand the process, carefully read the following sample paragraphs. Each develops one of the categories and
techniques/devices asked for in the prompt. Notice the specific references and the "connective tissue." Also, notice that
details that do no apply to the prompt have been ignored.
A. This paragraph develops imagery.
Joyce creates imagery to lead his reader to sense the cloud of death that pervades Gabriel's world. From its very title
"The Dead," the reader is prepared for loss. Just what has Gabriel lost: his wife, his confidence, his job, a friend, a
relative, what? As his "wife slept," Gabriel sees her "half-open mouth" and "listens" to her "deep-drawn breath." The
reader almost senses this to be a death watch. The images about the room reinforce this sense of doom. One boot is
"limp" and the other is "fallen down." Picturing the future, Gabriel sees a "drawing-room dressed in black" with blinds
"drawn down" and his Aunt Kate "crying" and "telling him how Julia had died." And to underscore his own feelings of
internal lifelessness, he can only find "lame and useless" words of comfort.
B. This paragraph develops the motif of time.
Time is a constant from the beginning to the end of the passage. In the first paragraph, Gabriel is in the present while
thinking of the past. He is an observer, watching his wife as he, himself, is observed by the narrator, and as we, as

64

readers, observe the entire scene. Time moves the reader and Gabriel through the experience. Immediately, we spend a
"few moments" with Gabriel as he goes back and forth in time assessing his relationship with his wife. He recognizes
she "had had romance in the past." But, "it hardly pains him now." He thinks of what she had been "then" in her
"girlish" beauty, which may indicate his own aging. His "strange, friendly pity," because she is "no longer beautiful,"
may-be self-pity, as well. In the next paragraph, we are with Gabriel as he reflects on his emotional "riot" only an hour
before. However, he jumps to the future because he can't sustain self-examination. He chooses to allow himself to jump
to this future and a new subjectAunt Julia's death. In this future, he continues to see only his inability and incompe-
tence. For Gabriel, all this will happen "very soon."
C. This passage develops diction.
Gabriel appears to be a man who is on the outside of his life. Joyce's diction reveals his passive nature. Gabriel "looked
on" and "watched" his wife sleeping. He spent time "listening to her breath" and was "hardly pained by his role in her
life." His eyes "rest" on her, and he "thinks of the past." All of Gabriel's actions are as weak as a "limp" and "fallen
down" boot, "inert in the face of life." He is in direct contrast to Michael Furey, who has "braved death." And he knows
this about himself. The narrator's diction reveals that Gabriel "did not like to say even to himself implying that he is too
weak to face the truth.
Later in the text, Gabriel's word choice further indicates his insecurity. He is troubled by his "riot of emotions," his
"foolish speech." It is obvious that Gabriel will not take such risks again.
D. This passage develops style.
Joyce's very straightforward writing style supports the conclusions he wishes the reader to draw about the character of
Gabriel. Most sentences are in the subject/verb, simple sentence form, reflecting the plain, uncomplicated character of
Gabriel.
Joyce employs a third person narrator to further reinforce Gabriel's detachment from his own circumstances. We watch
him observing his own life with little or no connection on his part. He wonders at his "riot of emotions." All this is
presented without Joyce using obvious poetic devices. This punctuates the lack of "romance" in Gabriel's life when
compared with that of Michael Furey.

65

Tip: Start a study group. Approach an essay as a team. After you've deconstructed the prompt, have each person write a paragraph on a
separate area of the question. Then come together and discuss what was written. You'll be amazed at how much fun this is because the work
will carry you away. This is a chance to explore exciting ideas.

We urge you to spend more time developing the body paragraphs than worrying about a concluding paragraph,
especially one that begins with "In conclusion," or "In summary." In such a brief essay, the reader will have no problem
remembering what you have already stated. It is not necessary to repeat yourself in a summary-type final paragraph.
If you want to make a final statement, try to link your ideas to a particularly effective line or image from the passage.
Note: Look at the last line of Sample B on motif. For Gabriel, all this will happen "very soon." This final sentence would be fine as the
conclusion to the essay. A conclusion does not have to be a paragraph. It can be the writer's final remark or observation presented in a sentence
or two.

SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAYS
Following are two actual student essays followed by a rubric and comments on each. Read both of the samples in
sequence to clarify the differences between "high" and "mid-range" essays.

66

67

Student Essay A

A picture is worth a thousand words, but James Joyce manages
to paint a pretty vivid one in only two short paragraphs.
Joyce offers tremendous insight into the character of Gabriel
in the short story The Dead. He captures the essence of a
scene laden with death and laced with tones of despair and
hopelessness. By employing third person narration
alternating with a stream of consciousness, Joyce
demonstrates his abilities to delve deep into Gabriels mind,
illustrating this somewhat detached disposition and low self-
image.
The passage takes us through Gabriels reflections upon
past, present, and future events while his inner character
unfolds. Joyces careful use of diction suggests that
Gabriel has emotionally closed himself off to the world as he
tries to cope with some aforementioned incident. He was
hardly pained to think about a situation which caused a
riot of emotions just a little earlier on that evening.
Here, Joyce is emphasizing Gabriels way of coping with an
unfavorable event by blocking it out. He continues to

1

5

10

15

20

68

unresentfully reflect upon what had occurred, closing
himself off from any pain he obviously experienced a short
while ago.
With the powerful omniscience of a third-person
narrator, Joyce is able to describe the workings of Gabriels
inter consciousness without writing from the first-person
point of view. Gabriel further detaches himself as he thinks
about his wife. He watches her from the point of view of an
outsider, as if they were never married. The mere fact that
Gabriel is able to do this suggests that he and his wife do
not have a truly loving relationship. This assertion is
underscored by the friendly pity Gabriel feels for his
wife, emphasizing the lack of true love in their
relationship. Gabriel later questions his wifes honesty,
further emphasizing a troubled relationship. The reader may
be inclined to infer that Gabriel is completely devoid of
compassion; however, this idea is refuted. Gabriel proceeds
to express an element of sorrow when he thinks back to his
wifes youth and beauty.
The evenings events had evidently triggered some type
of emotional outburst which Gabriel cannot stop thinking
about. His mental state is paralleled by the chaotic state

25

30

35

40

69

of disorder in the room he is in. With a masterful control
of language and syntax, Joyce describes in short, choppy
sentences they array of clothing strewn around the room.
This is followed by one of the longest sentences in the
passage. Joyce reveals this series of events all at once,
paralleling Gabriels release of a multitude of emotions at
once.
Joyce weaves a motif of darkness and death into the
story. His aunts haggard appearance ironically catches
Gabriels attention during the recitation of Arrayed for the
Bridal, a seemingly happy song. This image of happiness and
marriage is further contrasted with images of the womans
funeral and a detailed description of how Gabriel will mourn
for her. Joyce also takes time to underscore Gabriels low
self-esteem, in that he will only think of lame and useless
words at a time when comforting tones are necessary. He
essentially describing himself, since it has been established
that he failed as a husband and that he is emotionally
distraught even though he blocks out the pain he feels. The
blinds would be drawn down, Gabriel says, as he describes
both the room at his aunts funeral and his mental state of
affairs.

70

The true originator of stream-of-consciousness
techniques, Joyce delves deep into Gabriels mind, describing
his wide range of emotions and state of mind. His powerful
diction reveals a great deal about Gabriels character while
his implied insights penetrate into the readers mind,
reinforcing the abstract meanings behind the actions and
events that transpire throughout the course of his story.

71

Student Essay B

In the excerpt from the short story The Dead from
Dubliners by James Joyce, the author describes some personality
traits of the character Gabriel as he sits watching a sleeping
woman. The Point of view from which this excerpt is expressed
helps the reader to get to know Gabriel because the narrator is
omniscient and knows how Gabriel perceives things and what he is
thinking. With the use of many literary devices such as
imagery, diction, and syntax, the reader is able to see that
Gabriel is an observant and reflective person, but he is also
detached.
Gabriel comes across as observant, because throughout the
entire passage he is observing a woman, his wife, sleeping. He
scans the room looking over everything and taking note of
everything. An example of this is looking at her tangled hair
and half-open mouth, listening to her deep drawn breath. The
author uses the technique of syntax (deep-drawn breath and
half-open mouth) in the above quotation to show us exactly
what Gabriel is seeing. Gabriel notices many details, and they
are described so that the reader can clearly formulate a picture
of what he is gazing at. This imagery can be seen in lines such

72

as the one where the womans boots are being described. One
boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down; the fellow of it
lay upon the side. The diction used such as limp and
upright, are concrete words that create clear pictures.
Another reason that Gabriel comes across as observant is because
he catches and notices little things. For example, he caught
the haggard look on his Aunt Julias face.
Resulting from the fact that Gabriel is observant, he is
also reflective. He thinks over past events that had happened
and wonders what caused them and why he did what he did. In the
first paragraph he reflects on his wifes fading beauty, what
she used to look like, and the story of the death of Michael
Furey. He realizes that it is a possibility that she had not
told him the entire story concerning the boys death. He
further reflects when he is thinking about his emotional
outburst. He asks himself many questions including From what
had it preceded?
A feeling of detachment is also present. The way he looks
at his wife as though he and she had never lived together as
man and wife shows that he is viewing his own life from an
objective standpoint. He is able to look at his own life as
though it wasnt his. The sentence that reads it hardly pained

73

him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in
her life, further exemplifies this feeling of detachment.
Feelings that he used to feel on longer even touched him. He
was able to recognize them yet remain separate. In the second
paragraph Gabriel continues to come across as remote. He is
able to picture and describe in great detail the death and
funeral of his Aunt Julie. He narrates the future drastic event
in a matter-of-fact way. Gabriel goes so far as to describe
what he will be thinking at the time of his Aunt Julias death
which is he would cast about in his mind for some words that
might console her (his Aunt Kate), and would find only lame and
useless ones. This statement finalizes the idea that Gabriel
is a person who is, at least to some degree, detached from his
own life.
Even though the passage is fairly short, the author is able
to impart a fair amount of information concerning the character
Gabriel. It becomes apparent that he possesses the qualities of
observance, reflection, and detachment. These qualities are all
interconnected because of the fact that he is observant leading
to his ability to reflect on his actions and actions of others.
This in turn leads to his detachment, because when he reflects
on his life he does it from the standpoint of a third-person

74

narrator. The authors use literary techniques helps to convey
these personality traits of Gabriel of a reader.

75

Rubrics
Let's take a look at a set of rubrics for this prose passage essay. (If you want to see actual rubrics as used in a recent Lit
exam, log on to the College Board Website: www.collegeboard.org/ap ) As you probably know, essays are rated on a 9
1 scale, with 9 the highest and 1 the lowest. Since we are not with you to personally rate your essay and to respond to
your style and approach, we will, instead, list the criteria for high-, middle-, and low-range papers. These criteria are
based on our experience with rubrics and reading Literature exam essays.
A high range essay can be a 9 or an 8. Middle refers to essays in the 7, 6, 5 range. And the low scoring essays are rated 4,
3, 2, 1.
After reading the following rubrics, evaluate the two essays that you have just read.
Tip: Let's be honest with each other. We all can recognize a 9 essay. It sings, and we wish we had written it. It's wonderful that the essays
don't all have to sing the same song with the same words and rhythm. Conversely, we can, unfortunately, recognize the 1 or 2 paper which is
off key, and we are relieved not to have written one like it.

76

77

Rating the Student Essays
High-Range Essay (98)
Indicates complete understanding of the prompt.
Distinguishes between what Gabriel acknowledges about himself and what the reader comes to know about
him.
Explores the complexity of Gabriel's character.
Identifies and analyzes Joyce's literary techniques, such as imagery, diction, point of view, motif, and style.
Cites specific references to the passage.
Illustrates and supports the points being made.
Is clear, well-organized, and coherent.
Reflects the ability to manipulate language at an advanced level.
Contains only minor errors or flaws, if any.
Tip: Rarely, a 7 essay can make the jump into the high range because of its more mature style and perception.
Middle-Range Essay (765)
Refers accurately to the prompt.
Refers accurately to the literary devices used by Joyce.
Provides a less thorough analysis of Gabriel's character than the higher-rated paper.
Is less adept at linking techniques to the purpose of the passage.
Demonstrates writing that is adequate to convey the writer's intent.
May not be sensitive to the implications about Gabriel's character.
Tip: The 7 paper demonstrates a more consistent command of college-level writing than does the 5 or 6 paper.
A 5 paper does the minimum required by the prompt. It relies on generalizations and sketchy analysis. It is often sidetracked by plot, and the
references may be limited or simplistic.
Low-Range Essay (4321)
Does not respond adequately to the prompt.

78

Demonstrates insufficient and/or inaccurate understanding of the passage.
Does not link literary devices to Gabriel's character.
Underdevelops and/or inaccurately analyzes literary techniques.
Fails to demonstrate an understanding of Gabriel's character.
Demonstrates weak control of the elements of diction, syntax, and organization
Tip: A 4 or 3 essay may do no more than paraphrase sections of the passage rather than analyze Gabriel's character.
A 2 essay may merely summarize the passage. (No matter how well written, a summary can never earn more than a 2.)
A 12 essay indicates a major lack of understanding and control. It fails to comprehend the prompt and/or the passage. It may also indicate
severe writing problems.

79

Student Essay A
This is a high-range paper for the following reasons:
Is on task.
Shows complete understanding of the prompt and the passage.
Indicates perceptive, subtle analysis (line 8).
Maintains excellent topic adherence (lines 9, 17, 28, 39).
Uses good "connective tissue" (repetition of key words).
Chooses good specific references (lines 11, 12, 21, 35).
Knows how to distinguish between the author and the narrator.
Understands point of view well.
Makes suggestions and inferences (lines 7, 20).
Demonstrates good critical thinking.
Is perceptive about syntax and the style of author (lines 2733).
Links techniques with character (line 34).
Demonstrates mature language manipulation (line 34).
Understands function of diction and motif (lines 3944).
Tip: It's best to omit extraneous judgmental words from your essay (line 44).
This is obviously a mature, critical reader and writer. Using subtle inferences and implications, the writer demonstrates
an understanding of the character of Gabriel as both Joyce presents him and as Gabriel views himself. There is nothing
extraneous or repetitious in this essay. Each point leads directly and compellingly to the next aspect of Gabriel's
character.
This is definitely a strong, high-range essay.
Student Essay B
This is a middle-range essay for the following reasons:
Sets up an introduction which indicates the techniques that will be developed, but neglects to clearly set up the
required discussion of how Gabriel views himself.

80

Immediately establishes that the essay will address Gabriel's character as drawn by the narrator and seen by the
reader.
Addresses three aspects of Gabriel's character without fully developing the analysis of literary techniques.
Adheres to the essay's topic.
Uses "connective tissue" (lines 21, 28).
Uses "echo words" (lines 8, 9, 10).
Uses citations from the passages.
Isolates some details to illustrate Gabriel's character (lines 31-32, 39).
Confuses syntax with diction (lines 12-13).
Lacks development of literary technique in paragraph 4.
Displays faulty diction and syntax.
Does not develop an important part of the prompthow Gabriel views himself.
Incorporates faulty logic at times (lines 44-49).
This essay is a solid, middle-range paper. The writer has a facility with literary analysis. Even though there are flashes of
real insight, they are not sustained throughout the essay. There is a strong opening paragraph which makes it clear to the
reader what the topic of the paper is. The writer obviously grasps Gabriel's character and the needed details to support
the character analysis. But the weakness in this paper is the writer's incomplete development of the relationship of
literary techniques to character analysis.
Note: Both essays have concluding paragraphs that are repetitive and largely unnecessary. It is best to avoid this type of
ending.
Rapid Review
The following points will provide you with a quick refresher when needed.
1. Familiarize yourself with the types of prose questions (prompts).
2. Highlight the prompt and understand all the required tasks.
3. Time your essay carefully.
4. Spend sufficient time "working the passage" before you begin writing.

81

5. Mark up the passage.
6. Create a strong opening paragraph.
7. Refer often to the passage.
8. Use concrete details and quotes to support your ideas.
9. Always stay on topic.
10. Avoid plot summary.
11. Include transitions and echo words.
12. Check the models and rubrics for guidance for self-evaluation.
13. Practicevary the question and your approach.
14. Share ideas with others

82

83

Literary Analysis Rubric
9-8 Superior papers specific in their references, cogent in their definitions, and free of plot summary that is not relevant
to the question. These essays need not be without flaws, but they demonstrate the writer's ability to discuss a literary
work with insight and understanding and to control a wide range of the elements of effective composition. At all times
they stay focused on the prompt.
7-6 These papers are less thorough, less perceptive or less specific than 9-8 papers. These essays are well-written but
with less maturity and control than the top papers. They demonstrate the writer's ability to analyze a literary work, but
they reveal a more limited understanding than do the papers in the 9-8 range. Generally, 6 essays present a less
sophisticated analysis and less consistent command of the elements of effective writing than essays scored 7.
5 Safe and plastic, superficiality characterizes these essays. Discussion of meaning may be pedestrian, mechanical, or
inadequately related to the chosen details. Typically, these essays reveal simplistic thinking and/or immature writing.
They usually demonstrate inconsistent control over the elements of composition and are not as well conceived,
organized, or developed as the upper-half papers. On the other hand, the writing is sufficient to convey the writer's ideas
and stays focused on the prompt.
4-3 Discussion is likely to be unpersuasive, perfunctory, underdeveloped or misguided. The meaning they deduce may be
inaccurate or insubstantial and not clearly related to the question. Part of the question may be omitted altogether. The
writing may convey the writer's ideas, but it reveals weak control over such elements as diction, organization, syntax or
grammar. Typically, these essays contain significant misinterpretations of the question or the work they discuss; they
may also contain little, if any, supporting evidence, and practice paraphrase and plot summary at the expense of
analysis.
2-1 These essays compound the weakness of essays in the 4-3 range and are frequently unacceptably brief. They are
poorly written on several counts, including many distracting errors in grammar and mechanics. Although the
writer may have made some effort to answer the question, the views presented have little clarity or coherence.

84

85

V. Getting Started:
The Most Dangerous Game

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/183078/june-20-2007/bloomberg-for-president

86

87

The Most Dangerous Game
by Richard Connell

"Off there to the right--somewhere--is a large island," said
Whitney." It's rather a mystery--"
"What island is it?" Rainsford asked.
"The old charts call it `Ship-Trap Island,"' Whitney replied." A
suggestive name, isn't it? Sailors have a curious dread of the place.
I don't know why. Some superstition--"
"Can't see it," remarked Rainsford, trying to peer through the
dank tropical night that was palpable as it pressed its thick warm
blackness in upon the yacht.
"You've good eyes," said Whitney, with a laugh," and I've seen
you pick off a moose moving in the brown fall bush at four
hundred yards, but even you can't see four miles or so through a
moonless Caribbean night."
"Nor four yards," admitted Rainsford. "Ugh! It's like moist black
velvet."
"It will be light enough in Rio," promised Whitney. "We should
make it in a few days. I hope the jaguar guns have come from
Purdey's. We should have some good hunting up the Amazon. Great sport, hunting."
"The best sport in the world," agreed Rainsford.
"For the hunter," amended Whitney. "Not for the jaguar."
"Don't talk rot, Whitney," said Rainsford. "You're a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares
how a jaguar feels?"
"Perhaps the jaguar does," observed Whitney.
"Bah! They've no understanding."
"Even so, I rather think they understand one thing--fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death."
"Nonsense," laughed Rainsford. "This hot weather is making you soft, Whitney. Be a realist. The
world is made up of two classes--the hunters and the huntees. Luckily, you and I are hunters. Do
you think we've passed that island yet?"
"I can't tell in the dark. I hope so."
"Why? " asked Rainsford.
"The place has a reputation--a bad one."
"Cannibals?" suggested Rainsford.
"Hardly. Even cannibals wouldn't live in such a God-forsaken place. But it's gotten into sailor lore,
somehow. Didn't you notice that the crew's nerves seemed a bit jumpy today?"
"They were a bit strange, now you mention it. Even Captain Nielsen--"
Figure 1 Richard Connell

88

"Yes, even that tough-minded old Swede, who'd go up to the devil himself and ask him for a light.
Those fishy blue eyes held a look I never saw there before. All I could get out of him was `This
place has an evil name among seafaring men, sir.' Then he said to me, very gravely, `Don't you feel
anything?'--as if the air about us was actually poisonous. Now, you mustn't laugh when I tell you
this--I did feel something like a sudden chill.
"There was no breeze. The sea was as flat as a plate-glass window. We were drawing near the island
then. What I felt was a--a mental chill; a sort of sudden dread."
"Pure imagination," said Rainsford.
"One superstitious sailor can taint the whole ship's company with his fear."
"Maybe. But sometimes I think sailors have an extra sense that tells them when they are in danger.
Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing--with wave lengths, just as sound and light have. An evil
place can, so to speak, broadcast vibrations of evil. Anyhow, I'm glad we're getting out of this zone.
Well, I think I'll turn in now, Rainsford."
"I'm not sleepy," said Rainsford. "I'm going to smoke another pipe up on the afterdeck."
"Good night, then, Rainsford. See you at breakfast."
"Right. Good night, Whitney."
There was no sound in the night as Rainsford sat there but the muffled throb of the engine that
drove the yacht swiftly through the darkness, and the swish and ripple of the wash of the propeller.
Rainsford, reclining in a steamer chair, indolently puffed on his favorite brier. The sensuous
drowsiness of the night was on him." It's so dark," he thought, "that I could sleep without closing
my eyes; the night would be my eyelids--"
An abrupt sound startled him. Off to the right he heard it, and his ears, expert in such matters, could
not be mistaken. Again he heard the sound, and again. Somewhere, off in the blackness, someone
had fired a gun three times.
Rainsford sprang up and moved quickly to the rail, mystified. He strained his eyes in the direction
from which the reports had come, but it was like trying to see through a blanket. He leaped upon
the rail and balanced himself there, to get greater elevation; his pipe, striking a rope, was knocked
from his mouth. He lunged for it; a short, hoarse cry came from his lips as he realized he had
reached too far and had lost his balance. The cry was pinched off short as the blood-warm waters of
the Caribbean Sea dosed over his head.
He struggled up to the surface and tried to cry out, but the wash from the speeding yacht slapped
him in the face and the salt water in his open mouth made him gag and strangle. Desperately he
struck out with strong strokes after the receding lights of the yacht, but he stopped before he had
swum fifty feet. A certain coolheadedness had come to him; it was not the first time he had been in
a tight place. There was a chance that his cries could be heard by someone aboard the yacht, but that
chance was slender and grew more slender as the yacht raced on. He wrestled himself out of his
clothes and shouted with all his power. The lights of the yacht became faint and ever-vanishing
fireflies; then they were blotted out entirely by the night.
Rainsford remembered the shots. They had come from the right, and doggedly he swam in that
direction, swimming with slow, deliberate strokes, conserving his strength. For a seemingly endless
time he fought the sea. He began to count his strokes; he could do possibly a hundred more and
then--
Rainsford heard a sound. It came out of the darkness, a high screaming sound, the sound of an
animal in an extremity of anguish and terror.

89

He did not recognize the animal that made the sound; he did not try to; with fresh vitality he swam
toward the sound. He heard it again; then it was cut short by another noise, crisp, staccato.
"Pistol shot," muttered Rainsford, swimming on.
Ten minutes of determined effort brought another sound to his ears--the most welcome he had ever
heard--the muttering and growling of the sea breaking on a rocky shore. He was almost on the rocks
before he saw them; on a night less calm he would have been shattered against them. With his
remaining strength he dragged himself from the swirling waters. Jagged crags appeared to jut up into
the opaqueness; he forced himself upward, hand over hand. Gasping, his hands raw, he reached a
flat place at the top. Dense jungle came down to the very edge of the cliffs. What perils that tangle
of trees and underbrush might hold for him did not concern Rainsford just then. All he knew was
that he was safe from his enemy, the sea, and that utter weariness was on him. He flung himself
down at the jungle edge and tumbled headlong into the deepest sleep of his life.
When he opened his eyes he knew from the position of the sun that it was late in the afternoon.
Sleep had given him new vigor; a sharp hunger was picking at him. He looked about him, almost
cheerfully.
"Where there are pistol shots, there are men. Where there are men, there is food," he thought. But
what kind of men, he wondered, in so forbidding a place? An unbroken front of snarled and ragged
jungle fringed the shore.
He saw no sign of a trail through the closely knit web of weeds and trees; it was easier to go along
the shore, and Rainsford floundered along by the water. Not far from where he landed, he stopped.
Some wounded thing--by the evidence, a large animal--had thrashed about in the underbrush; the
jungle weeds were crushed down and the moss was lacerated; one patch of weeds was stained
crimson. A small, glittering object not far away caught Rainsford's eye and he picked it up. It was an
empty cartridge.
"A twenty-two," he remarked. "That's odd. It must have been a fairly large animal too. The hunter
had his nerve with him to tackle it with a light gun. It's clear that the brute put up a fight. I suppose
the first three shots I heard was when the hunter flushed his quarry and wounded it. The last shot
was when he trailed it here and finished it."
He examined the ground closely and found what he had hoped to find--the print of hunting boots.
They pointed along the cliff in the direction he had been going. Eagerly he hurried along, now
slipping on a rotten log or a loose stone, but making headway; night was beginning to settle down
on the island.
Bleak darkness was blacking out the sea and jungle when Rainsford sighted the lights. He came upon
them as he turned a crook in the coast line; and his first thought was that be had come upon a
village, for there were many lights. But as he forged along he saw to his great astonishment that all
the lights were in one enormous building--a lofty structure with pointed towers plunging upward
into the gloom. His eyes made out the shadowy outlines of a palatial chateau; it was set on a high
bluff, and on three sides of it cliffs dived down to where the sea licked greedy lips in the shadows.
"Mirage," thought Rainsford. But it was no mirage, he found, when he opened the tall spiked iron
gate. The stone steps were real enough; the massive door with a leering gargoyle for a knocker was
real enough; yet above it all hung an air of unreality.
He lifted the knocker, and it creaked up stiffly, as if it had never before been used. He let it fall, and
it startled him with its booming loudness. He thought he heard steps within; the door remained
closed. Again Rainsford lifted the heavy knocker, and let it fall. The door opened then--opened as

90

suddenly as if it were on a spring--and Rainsford stood blinking in the river of glaring gold light that
poured out. The first thing Rainsford's eyes discerned was the largest man Rainsford had ever seen--
a gigantic creature, solidly made and black bearded to the waist. In his hand the man held a long-
barreled revolver, and he was pointing it straight at Rainsford's heart.
Out of the snarl of beard two small eyes regarded Rainsford.
"Don't be alarmed," said Rainsford, with a smile which he hoped was disarming. "I'm no robber. I
fell off a yacht. My name is Sanger Rainsford of New York City."
The menacing look in the eyes did not change. The revolver pointing as rigidly as if the giant were a
statue. He gave no sign that he understood Rainsford's words, or that he had even heard them. He
was dressed in uniform--a black uniform trimmed with gray astrakhan.
"I'm Sanger Rainsford of New York," Rainsford began again. "I fell off a yacht. I am hungry."
The man's only answer was to raise with his thumb the hammer of his revolver. Then Rainsford saw
the man's free hand go to his forehead in a military salute, and he saw him click his heels together
and stand at attention. Another man was coming down the broad marble steps, an erect, slender
man in evening clothes. He advanced to Rainsford and held out his hand.
In a cultivated voice marked by a slight accent that gave it added precision and deliberateness, he
said, "It is a very great pleasure and honor to welcome Mr. Sanger Rainsford, the celebrated hunter,
to my home."
Automatically Rainsford shook the man's hand.
"I've read your book about hunting snow leopards in Tibet, you see," explained the man. "I am
General Zaroff."
Rainsford's first impression was that the man was singularly handsome; his second was that there
was an original, almost bizarre quality about the general's face. He was a tall man past middle age, for
his hair was a vivid white; but his thick eyebrows and pointed military mustache were as black as the
night from which Rainsford had come. His eyes, too, were black and very bright. He had high
cheekbones, a sharpcut nose, a spare, dark face--the face of a man used to giving orders, the face of
an aristocrat. Turning to the giant in uniform, the general made a sign. The giant put away his pistol,
saluted, withdrew.
"Ivan is an incredibly strong fellow," remarked the general, "but he has the misfortune to be deaf
and dumb. A simple fellow, but, I'm afraid, like all his race, a bit of a savage."
"Is he Russian?"
"He is a Cossack," said the general, and his smile showed red lips and pointed teeth. "So am I."
"Come," he said, "we shouldn't be chatting here. We can talk later. Now you want clothes, food,
rest. You shall have them. This is a most-restful spot."
Ivan had reappeared, and the general spoke to him with lips that moved but gave forth no sound.
"Follow Ivan, if you please, Mr. Rainsford," said the general. "I was about to have my dinner when
you came. I'll wait for you. You'll find that my clothes will fit you, I think."
It was to a huge, beam-ceilinged bedroom with a canopied bed big enough for six men that
Rainsford followed the silent giant. Ivan laid out an evening suit, and Rainsford, as he put it on,
noticed that it came from a London tailor who ordinarily cut and sewed for none below the rank of
duke.
The dining room to which Ivan conducted him was in many ways remarkable. There was a medieval
magnificence about it; it suggested a baronial hall of feudal times with its oaken panels, its high
ceiling, its vast refectory tables where twoscore men could sit down to eat. About the hall were

91

mounted heads of many animals--lions, tigers, elephants, moose, bears; larger or more perfect
specimens Rainsford had never seen. At the great table the general was sitting, alone.
"You'll have a cocktail, Mr. Rainsford," he suggested. The cocktail was surpassingly good; and,
Rainsford noted, the table apointments were of the finest--the linen, the crystal, the silver, the china.
They were eating borsch, the rich, red soup with whipped cream so dear to Russian palates. Half
apologetically General Zaroff said, "We do our best to preserve the amenities of civilization here.
Please forgive any lapses. We are well off the beaten track, you know. Do you think the champagne
has suffered from its long ocean trip?"
"Not in the least," declared Rainsford. He was finding the general a most thoughtful and affable
host, a true cosmopolite. But there was one small trait of .the general's that made Rainsford
uncomfortable. Whenever he looked up from his plate he found the general studying him,
appraising him narrowly.
"Perhaps," said General Zaroff, "you were surprised that I recognized your name. You see, I read all
books on hunting published in English, French, and Russian. I have but one passion in my life, Mr.
Rainsford, and it is the hunt."
"You have some wonderful heads here," said Rainsford as he ate a particularly well-cooked filet
mignon. " That Cape buffalo is the largest I ever saw."
"Oh, that fellow. Yes, he was a monster."
"Did he charge you?"
"Hurled me against a tree," said the general. "Fractured my skull. But I got the brute."
"I've always thought," said Rainsford, "that the Cape buffalo is the most dangerous of all big game."
For a moment the general did not reply; he was smiling his curious red-lipped smile. Then he said
slowly, "No. You are wrong, sir. The Cape buffalo is not the most dangerous big game." He sipped
his wine. "Here in my preserve on this island," he said in the same slow tone, "I hunt more
dangerous game."
Rainsford expressed his surprise. "Is there big game on this island?"
The general nodded. "The biggest."
"Really?"
"Oh, it isn't here naturally, of course. I have to stock the island."
"What have you imported, general?" Rainsford asked. "Tigers?"
The general smiled. "No," he said. "Hunting tigers ceased to interest me some years ago. I exhausted
their possibilities, you see. No thrill left in tigers, no real danger. I live for danger, Mr. Rainsford."
The general took from his pocket a gold cigarette case and offered his guest a long black cigarette
with a silver tip; it was perfumed and gave off a smell like incense.
"We will have some capital hunting, you and I," said the general. "I shall be most glad to have your
society."
"But what game--" began Rainsford.
"I'll tell you," said the general. "You will be amused, I know. I think I may say, in all modesty, that I
have done a rare thing. I have invented a new sensation. May I pour you another glass of port?"
"Thank you, general."
The general filled both glasses, and said, "God makes some men poets. Some He makes kings, some
beggars. Me He made a hunter. My hand was made for the trigger, my father said. He was a very rich
man with a quarter of a million acres in the Crimea, and he was an ardent sportsman. When I was
only five years old he gave me a little gun, specially made in Moscow for me, to shoot sparrows with.

92

When I shot some of his prize turkeys with it, he did not punish me; he complimented me on my
marksmanship. I killed my first bear in the Caucasus when I was ten. My whole life has been one
prolonged hunt. I went into the army--it was expected of noblemen's sons--and for a time
commanded a division of Cossack cavalry, but my real interest was always the hunt. I have hunted
every kind of game in every land. It would be impossible for me to tell you how many animals I have
killed."
The general puffed at his cigarette.
"After the debacle in Russia I left the country, for it was imprudent for an officer of the Czar to stay
there. Many noble Russians lost everything. I, luckily, had invested heavily in American securities, so
I shall never have to open a tearoom in Monte Carlo or drive a taxi in Paris. Naturally, I continued
to hunt--grizzliest in your Rockies, crocodiles in the Ganges, rhinoceroses in East Africa. It was in
Africa that the Cape buffalo hit me and laid me up for six months. As soon as I recovered I started
for the Amazon to hunt jaguars, for I had heard they were unusually cunning. They weren't." The
Cossack sighed. "They were no match at all for a hunter with his wits about him, and a high-
powered rifle. I was bitterly disappointed. I was lying in my tent with a splitting headache one night
when a terrible thought pushed its way into my mind. Hunting was beginning to bore me! And
hunting, remember, had been my life. I have heard that in America businessmen often go to pieces
when they give up the business that has been their life."
"Yes, that's so," said Rainsford.
The general smiled. "I had no wish to go to pieces," he said. "I must do something. Now, mine is an
analytical mind, Mr. Rainsford. Doubtless that is why I enjoy the problems of the chase."
"No doubt, General Zaroff."
"So," continued the general, "I asked myself why the hunt no longer fascinated me. You are much
younger than I am, Mr. Rainsford, and have not hunted as much, but you perhaps can guess the
answer."
"What was it?"
"Simply this: hunting had ceased to be what you call à sporting proposition.' It had become too
easy. I always got my quarry. Always. There is no greater bore than perfection."
The general lit a fresh cigarette.
"No animal had a chance with me any more. That is no boast; it is a mathematical certainty. The
animal had nothing but his legs and his instinct. Instinct is no match for reason. When I thought of
this it was a tragic moment for me, I can tell you."
Rainsford leaned across the table, absorbed in what his host was saying.
"It came to me as an inspiration what I must do," the general went on.
"And that was?"
The general smiled the quiet smile of one who has faced an obstacle and surmounted it with success.
"I had to invent a new animal to hunt," he said.
"A new animal? You're joking." "Not at all," said the general. "I never joke about hunting. I needed
a new animal. I found one. So I bought this island built this house, and here I do my hunting. The
island is perfect for my purposes--there are jungles with a maze of traits in them, hills, swamps--"
"But the animal, General Zaroff?"
"Oh," said the general, "it supplies me with the most exciting hunting in the world. No other
hunting compares with it for an instant. Every day I hunt, and I never grow bored now, for I have a
quarry with which I can match my wits."

93

Rainsford's bewilderment showed in his face.
"I wanted the ideal animal to hunt," explained the general. "So I said, `What are the attributes of an
ideal quarry?' And the answer was, of course, Ìt must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must
be able to reason."'
"But no animal can reason," objected Rainsford.
"My dear fellow," said the general, "there is one that can."
"But you can't mean--" gasped Rainsford.
"And why not?"
"I can't believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke."
"Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting."
"Hunting? Great Guns, General Zaroff, what you speak of is murder."
The general laughed with entire good nature. He regarded Rainsford quizzically. "I refuse to believe
that so modern and civilized a young man as you seem to be harbors romantic ideas about the value
of human life. Surely your experiences in the war--"
"Did not make me condone cold-blooded murder," finished Rainsford stiffly.
Laughter shook the general. "How extraordinarily droll you are!" he said. "One does not expect
nowadays to find a young man of the educated class, even in America, with such a naive, and, if I
may say so, mid-Victorian point of view. It's like finding a snuffbox in a limousine. Ah, well,
doubtless you had Puritan ancestors. So many Americans appear to have had. I'll wager you'll forget
your notions when you go hunting with me. You've a genuine new thrill in store for you, Mr.
Rainsford."
"Thank you, I'm a hunter, not a murderer."
"Dear me," said the general, quite unruffled, "again that unpleasant word. But I think I can show
you that your scruples are quite ill founded."
"Yes?"
"Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong. The weak of
the world were put here to give the strong pleasure. I am strong. Why should I not use my gift? If I
wish to hunt, why should I not? I hunt the scum of the earth: sailors from tramp ships--lassars,
blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels--a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of
them."
"But they are men," said Rainsford hotly.
"Precisely," said the general. "That is why I use them. It gives me pleasure. They can reason, after a
fashion. So they are dangerous."
"But where do you get them?"
The general's left eyelid fluttered down in a wink. "This island is called Ship Trap," he answered.
"Sometimes an angry god of the high seas sends them to me. Sometimes, when Providence is not so
kind, I help Providence a bit. Come to the window with me."
Rainsford went to the window and looked out toward the sea.
"Watch! Out there!" exclaimed the general, pointing into the night. Rainsford's eyes saw only
blackness, and then, as the general pressed a button, far out to sea Rainsford saw the flash of lights.
The general chuckled. "They indicate a channel," he said, "where there's none; giant rocks with razor
edges crouch like a sea monster with wide-open jaws. They can crush a ship as easily as I crush this
nut." He dropped a walnut on the hardwood floor and brought his heel grinding down on it. "Oh,
yes," he said, casually, as if in answer to a question, "I have electricity. We try to be civilized here."

94

"Civilized? And you shoot down men?"
A trace of anger was in the general's black eyes, but it was there for but a second; and he said, in his
most pleasant manner, "Dear me, what a righteous young man you are! I assure you I do not do the
thing you suggest. That would be barbarous. I treat these visitors with every consideration. They get
plenty of good food and exercise. They get into splendid physical condition. You shall see for
yourself tomorrow."
"What do you mean?"
"We'll visit my training school," smiled the general. "It's in the cellar. I have about a dozen pupils
down there now. They're from the Spanish bark San Lucar that had the bad luck to go on the rocks
out there. A very inferior lot, I regret to say. Poor specimens and more accustomed to the deck than
to the jungle." He raised his hand, and Ivan, who served as waiter, brought thick Turkish coffee.
Rainsford, with an effort, held his tongue in check.
"It's a game, you see," pursued the general blandly. "I suggest to one of them that we go hunting. I
give him a supply of food and an excellent hunting knife. I give him three hours' start. I am to
follow, armed only with a pistol of the smallest caliber and range. If my quarry eludes me for three
whole days, he wins the game. If I find him "--the general smiled--" he loses."
"Suppose he refuses to be hunted?"
"Oh," said the general, "I give him his option, of course. He need not play that game if he doesn't
wish to. If he does not wish to hunt, I turn him over to Ivan. Ivan once had the honor of serving as
official knouter to the Great White Czar, and he has his own ideas of sport. Invariably, Mr.
Rainsford, invariably they choose the hunt."
"And if they win?"
The smile on the general's face widened. "To date I have not lost," he said. Then he added, hastily:
"I don't wish you to think me a braggart, Mr. Rainsford. Many of them afford only the most
elementary sort of problem. Occasionally I strike a tartar. One almost did win. I eventually had to
use the dogs."
"The dogs?"
"This way, please. I'll show you."
The general steered Rainsford to a window. The lights from the windows sent a flickering
illumination that made grotesque patterns on the courtyard below, and Rainsford could see moving
about there a dozen or so huge black shapes; as they turned toward him, their eyes glittered greenly.
"A rather good lot, I think," observed the general. "They are let out at seven every night. If anyone
should try to get into my house--or out of it--something extremely regrettable would occur to him."
He hummed a snatch of song from the Folies Bergere.
"And now," said the general, "I want to show you my new collection of heads. Will you come with
me to the library?"
"I hope," said Rainsford, "that you will excuse me tonight, General Zaroff. I'm really not feeling
well."
"Ah, indeed?" the general inquired solicitously. "Well, I suppose that's only natural, after your long
swim. You need a good, restful night's sleep. Tomorrow you'll feel like a new man, I'll wager. Then
we'll hunt, eh? I've one rather promising prospect--" Rainsford was hurrying from the room.
"Sorry you can't go with me tonight," called the general. "I expect rather fair sport--a big, strong,
black. He looks resourceful--Well, good night, Mr. Rainsford; I hope you have a good night's rest."

95

The bed was good, and the pajamas of the softest silk, and he was tired in every fiber of his being,
but nevertheless Rainsford could not quiet his brain with the opiate of sleep. He lay, eyes wide open.
Once he thought he heard stealthy steps in the corridor outside his room. He sought to throw open
the door; it would not open. He went to the window and looked out. His room was high up in one
of the towers. The lights of the chateau were out now, and it was dark and silent; but there was a
fragment of sallow moon, and by its wan light he could see, dimly, the courtyard. There, weaving in
and out in the pattern of shadow, were black, noiseless forms; the hounds heard him at the window
and looked up, expectantly, with their green eyes. Rainsford went back to the bed and lay down. By
many methods he tried to put himself to sleep. He had achieved a doze when, just as morning began
to come, he heard, far off in the jungle, the faint report of a pistol.
General Zaroff did not appear until luncheon. He was dressed faultlessly in the tweeds of a country
squire. He was solicitous about the state of Rainsford's health.
"As for me," sighed the general, "I do not feel so well. I am worried, Mr. Rainsford. Last night I
detected traces of my old complaint."
To Rainsford's questioning glance the general said, "Ennui. Boredom."
Then, taking a second helping of crpes Suzette, the general explained: "The hunting was not good
last night. The fellow lost his head. He made a straight trail that offered no problems at all. That's
the trouble with these sailors; they have dull brains to begin with, and they do not know how to get
about in the woods. They do excessively stupid and obvious things. It's most annoying. Will you
have another glass of Chablis, Mr. Rainsford?"
"General," said Rainsford firmly, "I wish to leave this island at once."
The general raised his thickets of eyebrows; he seemed hurt. "But, my dear fellow," the general
protested, "you've only just come. You've had no hunting--"
"I wish to go today," said Rainsford. He saw the dead black eyes of the general on him, studying
him. General Zaroff's face suddenly brightened.
He filled Rainsford's glass with venerable Chablis from a dusty bottle.
"Tonight," said the general, "we will hunt--you and I."
Rainsford shook his head. "No, general," he said. "I will not hunt."
The general shrugged his shoulders and delicately ate a hothouse grape. "As you wish, my friend," he
said. "The choice rests entirely with you. But may I not venture to suggest that you will find my idea
of sport more diverting than Ivan's?"
He nodded toward the corner to where the giant stood, scowling, his thick arms crossed on his
hogshead of chest.
"You don't mean--" cried Rainsford.
"My dear fellow," said the general, "have I not told you I always mean what I say about hunting?
This is really an inspiration. I drink to a foeman worthy of my steel--at last." The general raised his
glass, but Rainsford sat staring at him.
"You'll find this game worth playing," the general said enthusiastically." Your brain against mine.
Your woodcraft against mine. Your strength and stamina against mine. Outdoor chess! And the
stake is not without value, eh?"
"And if I win--" began Rainsford huskily.
"I'll cheerfully acknowledge myself defeat if I do not find you by midnight of the third day," said
General Zaroff. "My sloop will place you on the mainland near a town." The general read what
Rainsford was thinking.

96

"Oh, you can trust me," said the Cossack. "I will give you my word as a gentleman and a sportsman.
Of course you, in turn, must agree to say nothing of your visit here."
"I'll agree to nothing of the kind," said Rainsford.
"Oh," said the general, "in that case--But why discuss that now? Three days hence we can discuss it
over a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, unless--"
The general sipped his wine.
Then a businesslike air animated him. "Ivan," he said to Rainsford, "will supply you with hunting
clothes, food, a knife. I suggest you wear moccasins; they leave a poorer trail. I suggest, too, that you
avoid the big swamp in the southeast corner of the island. We call it Death Swamp. There's
quicksand there. One foolish fellow tried it. The deplorable part of it was that Lazarus followed him.
You can imagine my feelings, Mr. Rainsford. I loved Lazarus; he was the finest hound in my pack.
Well, I must beg you to excuse me now. I always' take a siesta after lunch. You'll hardly have time
for a nap, I fear. You'll want to start, no doubt. I shall not follow till dusk. Hunting at night is so
much more exciting than by day, don't you think? Au revoir, Mr. Rainsford, au revoir." General
Zaroff, with a deep, courtly bow, strolled from the room.
From another door came Ivan. Under one arm he carried khaki hunting clothes, a haversack of
food, a leather sheath containing a long-bladed hunting knife; his right hand rested on a cocked
revolver thrust in the crimson sash about his waist.
Rainsford had fought his way through the bush for two hours. "I must keep my nerve. I must keep
my nerve," he said through tight teeth.
He had not been entirely clearheaded when the chateau gates snapped shut behind him. His whole
idea at first was to put distance between himself and General Zaroff; and, to this end, he had
plunged along, spurred on by the sharp rowers of something very like panic. Now he had got a grip
on himself, had stopped, and was taking stock of himself and the situation. He saw that straight
flight was futile; inevitably it would bring him face to face with the sea. He was in a picture with a
frame of water, and his operations, clearly, must take place within that frame.
"I'll give him a trail to follow," muttered Rainsford, and he struck off from the rude path he had
been following into the trackless wilderness. He executed a series of intricate loops; he doubled on
his trail again and again, recalling all the lore of the fox hunt, and all the dodges of the fox. Night
found him leg-weary, with hands and face lashed by the branches, on a thickly wooded ridge. He
knew it would be insane to blunder on through the dark, even if he had the strength. His need for
rest was imperative and he thought, "I have played the fox, now I must play the cat of the fable." A
big tree with a thick trunk and outspread branches was near by, and, taking care to leave not the
slightest mark, he climbed up into the crotch, and, stretching out on one of the broad limbs, after a
fashion, rested. Rest brought him new confidence and almost a feeling of security. Even so zealous a
hunter as General Zaroff could not trace him there, he told himself; only the devil himself could
follow that complicated trail through the jungle after dark. But perhaps the general was a devil--
An apprehensive night crawled slowly by like a wounded snake and sleep did not visit Rainsford,
although the silence of a dead world was on the jungle. Toward morning when a dingy gray was
varnishing the sky, the cry of some startled bird focused Rainsford's attention in that direction.
Something was coming through the bush, coming slowly, carefully, coming by the same winding way
Rainsford had come. He flattened himself down on the limb and, through a screen of leaves almost
as thick as tapestry, he watched. . . . That which was approaching was a man.

97

It was General Zaroff. He made his way along with his eyes fixed in utmost concentration on the
ground before him. He paused, almost beneath the tree, dropped to his knees and studied the
ground. Rainsford's impulse was to hurl himself down like a panther, but he saw that the general's
right hand held something metallic--a small automatic pistol.
The hunter shook his head several times, as if he were puzzled. Then he straightened up and took
from his case one of his black cigarettes; its pungent incenselike smoke floated up to Rainsford's
nostrils.
Rainsford held his breath. The general's eyes had left the ground and were traveling inch by inch up
the tree. Rainsford froze there, every muscle tensed for a spring. But the sharp eyes of the hunter
stopped before they reached the limb where Rainsford lay; a smile spread over his brown face. Very
deliberately he blew a smoke ring into the air; then he turned his back on the tree and walked
carelessly away, back along the trail he had come. The swish of the underbrush against his hunting
boots grew fainter and fainter.
The pent-up air burst hotly from Rainsford's lungs. His first thought made him feel sick and numb.
The general could follow a trail through the woods at night; he could follow an extremely difficult
trail; he must have uncanny powers; only by the merest chance had the Cossack failed to see his
quarry.
Rainsford's second thought was even more terrible. It sent a shudder of cold horror through his
whole being. Why had the general smiled? Why had he turned back?
Rainsford did not want to believe what his reason told him was true, but the truth was as evident as
the sun that had by now pushed through the morning mists. The general was playing with him! The
general was saving him for another day's sport! The Cossack was the cat; he was the mouse. Then it
was that Rainsford knew the full meaning of terror.
"I will not lose my nerve. I will not."
He slid down from the tree, and struck off again into the woods. His face was set and he forced the
machinery of his mind to function. Three hundred yards from his hiding place he stopped where a
huge dead tree leaned precariously on a smaller, living one. Throwing off his sack of food, Rainsford
took his knife from its sheath and began to work with all his energy.
The job was finished at last, and he threw himself down behind a fallen log a hundred feet away. He
did not have to wait long. The cat was coming again to play with the mouse.
Following the trail with the sureness of a bloodhound came General Zaroff. Nothing escaped those
searching black eyes, no crushed blade of grass, no bent twig, no mark, no matter how faint, in the
moss. So intent was the Cossack on his stalking that he was upon the thing Rainsford had made
before he saw it. His foot touched the protruding bough that was the trigger. Even as he touched it,
the general sensed his danger and leaped back with the agility of an ape. But he was not quite quick
enough; the dead tree, delicately adjusted to rest on the cut living one, crashed down and struck the
general a glancing blow on the shoulder as it fell; but for his alertness, he must have been smashed
beneath it. He staggered, but he did not fall; nor did he drop his revolver. He stood there, rubbing
his injured shoulder, and Rainsford, with fear again gripping his heart, heard the general's mocking
laugh ring through the jungle.
"Rainsford," called the general, "if you are within sound of my voice, as I suppose you are, let me
congratulate you. Not many men know how to make a Malay mancatcher. Luckily for me I, too,
have hunted in Malacca. You are proving interesting, Mr. Rainsford. I am going now to have my
wound dressed; it's only a slight one. But I shall be back. I shall be back."

98

When the general, nursing his bruised shoulder, had gone, Rainsford took up his flight again. It was
flight now, a desperate, hopeless flight, that carried him on for some hours. Dusk came, then
darkness, and still he pressed on. The ground grew softer under his moccasins; the vegetation grew
ranker, denser; insects bit him savagely.
Then, as he stepped forward, his foot sank into the ooze. He tried to wrench it back, but the muck
sucked viciously at his foot as if it were a giant leech. With a violent effort, he tore his feet loose. He
knew where he was now. Death Swamp and its quicksand.
His hands were tight closed as if his nerve were something tangible that someone in the darkness
was trying to tear from his grip. The softness of the earth had given him an idea. He stepped back
from the quicksand a dozen feet or so and, like some huge prehistoric beaver, he began to dig.
Rainsford had dug himself in in France when a second's delay meant death. That had been a placid
pastime compared to his digging now. The pit grew deeper; when it was above his shoulders, he
climbed out and from some hard saplings cut stakes and sharpened them to a fine point. These
stakes he planted in the bottom of the pit with the points sticking up. With flying fingers he wove a
rough carpet of weeds and branches and with it he covered the mouth of the pit. Then, wet with
sweat and aching with tiredness, he crouched behind the stump of a lightning-charred tree.
He knew his pursuer was coming; he heard the padding sound of feet on the soft earth, and the
night breeze brought him the perfume of the general's cigarette. It seemed to Rainsford that the
general was coming with unusual swiftness; he was not feeling his way along, foot by foot.
Rainsford, crouching there, could not see the general, nor could he see the pit. He lived a year in a
minute. Then he felt an impulse to cry aloud with joy, for he heard the sharp crackle of the breaking
branches as the cover of the pit gave way; he heard the sharp scream of pain as the pointed stakes
found their mark. He leaped up from his place of concealment. Then he cowered back. Three feet
from the pit a man was standing, with an electric torch in his hand.
"You've done well, Rainsford," the voice of the general called. "Your Burmese tiger pit has claimed
one of my best dogs. Again you score. I think, Mr. Rainsford, Ill see what you can do against my
whole pack. I'm going home for a rest now. Thank you for a most amusing evening."
At daybreak Rainsford, lying near the swamp, was awakened by a sound that made him know that he
had new things to learn about fear. It was a distant sound, faint and wavering, but he knew it. It was
the baying of a pack of hounds.
Rainsford knew he could do one of two things. He could stay where he was and wait. That was
suicide. He could flee. That was postponing the inevitable. For a moment he stood there, thinking.
An idea that held a wild chance came to him, and, tightening his belt, he headed away from the
swamp.
The baying of the hounds drew nearer, then still nearer, nearer, ever nearer. On a ridge Rainsford
climbed a tree. Down a watercourse, not a quarter of a mile away, he could see the bush moving.
Straining his eyes, he saw the lean figure of General Zaroff; just ahead of him Rainsford made out
another figure whose wide shoulders surged through the tall jungle weeds; it was the giant Ivan, and
he seemed pulled forward by some unseen force; Rainsford knew that Ivan must be holding the
pack in leash.
They would be on him any minute now. His mind worked frantically. He thought of a native trick he
had learned in Uganda. He slid down the tree. He caught hold of a springy young sapling and to it
he fastened his hunting knife, with the blade pointing down the trail; with a bit of wild grapevine he

99

tied back the sapling. Then he ran for his life. The hounds raised their voices as they hit the fresh
scent. Rainsford knew now how an animal at bay feels.
He had to stop to get his breath. The baying of the hounds stopped abruptly, and Rainsford's heart
stopped too. They must have reached the knife.
He shinned excitedly up a tree and looked back. His pursuers had stopped. But the hope that was in
Rainsford's brain when he climbed died, for he saw in the shallow valley that General Zaroff was
still on his feet. But Ivan was not. The knife, driven by the recoil of the springing tree, had not
wholly failed.
Rainsford had hardly tumbled to the ground when the pack took up the cry again.
"Nerve, nerve, nerve!" he panted, as he dashed along. A blue gap showed between the trees dead
ahead. Ever nearer drew the hounds. Rainsford forced himself on toward that gap. He reached it. It
was the shore of the sea. Across a cove he could see the gloomy gray stone of the chateau. Twenty
feet below him the sea rumbled and hissed. Rainsford hesitated. He heard the hounds. Then he
leaped far out into the sea. . . .
When the general and his pack reached the place by the sea, the Cossack stopped. For some minutes
he stood regarding the blue-green expanse of water. He shrugged his shoulders. Then be sat down,
took a drink of brandy from a silver flask, lit a cigarette, and hummed a bit from Madame Butterfly.
General Zaroff had an exceedingly good dinner in his great paneled dining hall that evening. With it
he had a bottle of Pol Roger and half a bottle of Chambertin. Two slight annoyances kept him from
perfect enjoyment. One was the thought that it would be difficult to replace Ivan; the other was that
his quarry had escaped him; of course, the American hadn't played the game--so thought the general
as he tasted his after-dinner liqueur. In his library he read, to soothe himself, from the works of
Marcus Aurelius. At ten he went up to his bedroom. He was deliciously tired, he said to himself, as
he locked himself in. There was a little moonlight, so, before turning on his light, he went to the
window and looked down at the courtyard. He could see the great hounds, and he called, "Better
luck another time," to them. Then he switched on the light.
A man, who had been hiding in the curtains of the bed, was standing there.
"Rainsford!" screamed the general. "How in God's name did you get here?"
"Swam," said Rainsford. "I found it quicker than walking through the jungle."
The general sucked in his breath and smiled. "I congratulate you," he said. "You have won the
game."
Rainsford did not smile. "I am still a beast at bay," he said, in a low, hoarse voice. "Get ready,
General Zaroff."
The general made one of his deepest bows. "I see," he said. "Splendid! One of us is to furnish a
repast for the hounds. The other will sleep in this very excellent bed. On guard, Rainsford." . . .
He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided.

100

101

VI. Writing About Literature

102

103

On-Line Guides to Writing About Literature
The following are guides to writing about literature from various university writing centers, instructors, and from W.W.
Norton. The Norton is the most comprehensive. I suggest printing out a couple of the writing center handouts initially,
and consulting the Norton site as you get further along in your paper.
Reading and Writing about Literature
Created by Joi Chevalier, based on work by Robby Sulcer
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~babydoll/coursematerial/spring96/closereading.html
D.K. Peterson's Writing About Literature--The Basics
Includes Conventions for Writing About Literature and Developing and Supporting a Thesis.
http://www.english.wayne.edu/~peterson/Fiction/litbasics.html
Writing A Literature Paper
from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/cws/wworkshop/tips/writtechlitpaper.htm
Writing About Literature
Dr. David Kay, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Includes information on formatting, etc.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/siewers/106/writinglit.htm
Writing About Literature:Some Helpful Things to Know
Purdue University Online Writing Lab
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/gl_lit.html
Handout from UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center
More comprehensive than the ones above, but still relatively brief.
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/literature.html
On-Line Companion to the Norton Introduction to Literature
A very comprehensive guide that discusses theory in addition to the basics.
http://www.wwnorton.com/introlit/wal.htm

104

105

Nobel Laureates in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 103 persons since 1901.

2006 - Orhan Pamuk
2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J.M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertsz
2001 - V.S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Gnter Grass
1998 - Jos Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
1993 - Toni Morrison
1992 - Derek Walcott
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1990 - Octavio Paz
1989 - Camilo Jos Cela
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1985 - Claude Simon
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
1983 - William Golding
1982 - Gabriel Garca Mrquez
1981 - Elias Canetti
1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
1979 - Odysseus Elytis
1975 - Eugenio Montale
1976 - Saul Bellow
1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry
Martinson
1973 - Patrick White
1972 - Heinrich Bll
1971 - Pablo Neruda
1970 - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
1969 - Samuel Beckett
1968 - Yasunari Kawabata
1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias
1966 - Samuel Agnon, Nelly
Sachs
1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov
1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre
1963 - Giorgos Seferis
1962 - John Steinbeck
1961 - Ivo Andric
1960 - Saint-John Perse
1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1957 - Albert Camus
1956 - Juan Ramn Jimnez
1955 - Halldr Laxness
1954 - Ernest Hemingway
1953 - Winston Churchill
1952 - Franois Mauriac
1951 - Pr Lagerkvist
1950 - Bertrand Russell
1949 - William Faulkner
1948 - T.S. Eliot
1947 - Andr Gide
1946 - Hermann Hesse
1944 - Johannes V. Jensen
1943 - The prize money was with
1/3 allocated to the Main Fund
and with 2/3 to the Special Fund
of this prize section
1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanp
1938 - Pearl Buck
1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
1936 - Eugene O'Neill
1934 - Luigi Pirandello
1933 - Ivan Bunin
1932 - John Galsworthy
1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1930 - Sinclair Lewis
1929 - Thomas Mann
1928 - Sigrid Undset
1927 - Henri Bergson

106

1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977 - Vicente Aleixandre

1920 - Knut Hamsun
1919 - Carl Spitteler
1918 - The prize money was
allocated to the Special Fund of
this prize section
1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik
Pontoppidan
1916 - Verner von Heidenstam
1915 - Romain Rolland
1914 - The prize money was
allocated to the Special Fund of
this prize section
1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann
1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck
1910 - Paul Heyse
1909 - Selma Lagerlf
1908 - Rudolf Eucken
1907 - Rudyard Kipling
1906 - Giosu Carducci
1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz
1904 - Frdric Mistral, Jos
Echegaray
1903 - Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson
1902 - Theodor Mommsen
1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont
1923 - William Butler Yeats
1922 - Jacinto Benavente
1921 - Anatole France

1945 - Gabriela Mistral
1901 - Sully Prudhomme
1926 - Grazia Deledda
1925 - George Bernard Shaw

107

Introductory Note: The Paradox of Literature

R. V. Young

Literature is paradoxical both in its nature and in its effect upon readers. Although letters inscribed upon a page or the
words of a spoken utterance are the media of a literary work, the work itself is neither the ink and paper nor the oral
performance. A successful poem or story compels our attention and seizes us with a sense of its reality, even while we
know that it is essentially (even when based upon historical fact) something made upa ction. The most memorable
works of literature are charged with signicance and cry out for understanding, reection, interpretation; but this
meaning carries most conviction insofar as it is not explicitnot paraded with banners ying and trumpets blaring. We
hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, says John Keats.
1
The role of literature in society is similarly equivocal.
It can be explained simply as entertainment or recreation; men and women have always told stories and sung songs to
amuse themselves, to pass the time, to lighten the burdens of real life. At the same time, literature has assumed a
central place in education and the transmission of culture throughout the history of Western civilization, contributing a
sense of communal identity and shaping both individual and social understanding of human experience. The intimate
part played by literature in cultural tradition has been a source of alarm to moralists and reformers from Plato to the
media critics and multiculturalists of our own day.

Literature, then, must be approached both with caution and abandon. A primary purpose of the study of literature is to
learn to read critically, to maintain reserve and distance in the face of an engaging, even beguiling, object. And yet, like
any work of arta symphony, for example, or a paintinga novel or an epic yields up its secrets only to a reader who
yields himself to its power. It is for this reason that literary study is a humane or humanistic discipline, not an exact or
empirical science. The ideal researcher in the physical sciences, insofar as he sticks rigorously to science, will be
absolutely objective in the sense that his humanity will exert no inuence on his methods or conclusions. Even a medical
researcher will be interested in the human body only as a biological mechanism, not as the outward manifestation of a
person with a soul. The literary scholar must of course be objective in the sense that he is disinterested; he must not
have an individual or personal stake in the interpretation. And yet, although the critics fate is not the fate of King Lear,
the critics human sympathy with the plight of that tragic protagonist is part of his critical response to the play as

108

literature. The human compassion of the cancer researcher for the victims of the disease, while it may be an important
motive, is not part of his research, not an element in his science as such. The natural sciences, therefore, provide a very
poor model for scholarship in the humanities. To be sure, there are factual, scientic elements of great importance to
inquiry in all the arts: a knowledge of Elizabethan stagecraft and printshop practices can furnish a good deal of useful
information about how Hamlet was seen by contemporaries and how the text was preserved, but such facts will never
explain why the play is still moving and important. Works of literature are not natural phenomena or specimens; they are
rather part of the cultural fabric of the world that we all inhabit. A poet, says William Wordsworth, is a man speaking to
men.
2
We cannot approach poets and poems as an entomologist approaches ants and ant hills.

Literature is vast and complex; a guide of this length can only be a modest sketch of the subject. My purpose is to
provide a brief description of the nature and purpose of literature and some sense of how it may be best approached. I
shall say something about the concept of literary kinds or genres, and something about how literature has developed
along with the development of Western civilization. I shall not discuss the literature of other civilizations, principally
because I lack the competence, but also because I suspect that literature in the sense that I use the term, although no
longer unique to the West, is a uniquely Western idea. Finally, I shall list some of the indispensable works of our
tradition, of which every educated person should have some knowledge, as well as lesser works that are also very ne or
very inuential and well worth perusal. The list will not be comprehensive: this essay is intended not only for
undergraduate literature majors, but for students of any age who wish to have a knowledge of literature commensurate
with a baccalaureate degree. Nothing that I can say will take the place of simply reading these works, but I hope that this
Guide will enable students to plan their own literary education, or ll in the gaps of such awareness as they possess, with
condence and prudence.

109

A Students Guide to Literature

The first problem one encounters in attempting to dene the nature and purpose of literature is the ambiguity of the
key terms. The word literature itself comprises a wide variety of sometimes incompatible meanings. Its etymological
origin, the Latin word littera, means, like the English word letter, both a graphic mark representing a sound or a
missive or written communication. Litteratura in Latin, like literature in English and the corresponding cognate words
in the various European vernacular tongues, had as its most important sense those writings which constitute the
elements of liberal learning. Hence a litteratus was a man notable for knowledge and cultivation. This notion is the basis
for the English phrase a man of letters. Literature as a term for written works of artwhat Wellek and Warren call
the literary work of art
3
is,
however, a nineteenth-century
development. The older generic
term was poetry, but today this
word is applied almost exclusively
to works written in verse rather
than prose; that is, poetry deploys
language measured off in metrical
feet, or at least divided into free
verse lines. Hence, for much of
this century, English departments have offered introductory courses and patronized introductory anthologies to
Literature, divided into units on Poetry, Fiction, and Drama.

Although it was generally rejected as a substantial distinction by ancient and Renaissance criticism, the force of the
prose/verse distinction has strengthened over the past two to three centuries because of the rise of prose ction, which
has taken over the business of telling stories and conned verse almost exclusively to lyrical and satirical modes.
Narrative verse is rarely written now, and contemporary verse drama tends to have an air of articiality. So far as I know,
no one has written scientic exposition in verse since Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of the more famous Charles)
published The Botanic Garden in heroic couplets late in the eighteenth century. Hence it makes sense in the twentieth
century to regard short to moderate length lyrical, reective, or satirical poetry as a particular kind of literature as
distinguished from ction and
drama, which tell stories through
narration and theatrical
representation.
4
My own practice
will be to alternate the terms
poetry and literature; the latter
is the more common usage today,
while the former will serve as a
reminder that it is imaginative
literature that is under discussion.

The account of literature given
here will rest upon the ancient
assumption of Plato and Aristotle
that the essence of literature, or
poetry, is mimesis; that is, the
imitation or representation of
reality or the human experience of
reality. Whether this fundamental
element of literature is cause for the disapproval of Socrates in Platos Republic or for Aristotles approval in the Poetics,
the mimetic function of literature is generally taken for granted by classical thinkers. This basic fact is difficult to

HOMER, it is now generally agreed in accordance with ancient tradition,
composed the Iliad and the Odyssey around 700 b.c.e, drawing upon an oral
tradition of poetic material handed down by memory. Probably a native of Chios
or Smyrna, he may well have been blind (heroic oral poetry would be an obvious
choice of career for a blind man in a warrior society), and some contemporary
may well have written the poems down in the letters that the Greeks were just
been in the process of adopting from the Phoenicians.

HORACE (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 b.c.e.), son of a freed slave who
prospered, came from more modest origins than his friend Virgil. Nonetheless,
his father had him well educated at Rome and then Athens, where he was
induced to join the army of Brutus, whose defeat and suicide at Philippi are so
dramatically rendered by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar. With his fathers property
mostly conscated upon his return, Horace secured a place in the Roman civil
service. His poetry came to the attention of Maecenas, who soon won for him the
patronage of the forgiving Emperor Augustus. Horaces disposition is the
opposite of his melancholy comrade Virgil. Throughout his poetrywhether in
the wry wit of his Satires and Epistles or the lyrical beauty of his Odes Horace
evinces a tolerant, detached skepticism and good humor. He was pleased to
accept the benefactions of Augustus and Maecenas, but he resisted their efforts
to involve him in politics or government. Preferring the leisure of the Sabine
farm that his poetry made famous, Horaces most important bequest to European
poetry is the theme of the superiority of rural retirement to the ambitious life of
court or city.

110

demonstrate precisely because it is the self-evident intuition of all mankind: when a friend has just read a new novel or
seen a new movie, our rst question is, What is it about? We expect, above all, a description of the characters as they
act and relate to one another. We wish to know what this particular work shows us about how life is lived. As a
representation of reality, a work of literature is an object made by an author. Our word poet comes from the Greek
verb poieo, to make. Our word ction is similarly derived from the Latin ngo, to fashion, to feign, or to form.
All of these terms suggest that at the center of literature or poetry is a verbal creation, made or formed to imitate or
feign some aspect of the human experience of life.

To a remarkable extent, the
categories devised by Aristotle in the
Poetics to analyze tragedy are
applicable, mutatis mutandis, to all
the genres of literature. The plot
(mythos) or story or arrangement of
incidents is the primary element,
because, he maintains, while
character makes men what they are,
it is action that determines happiness
and unhappiness. The second,
closely related element is
characterization (ethos), which
determines how individuals will act.
Diction (lexis) or language or, best,
style is the next element; it is closely
related to thought (dianoia) or themes
or ideas that emerge in the discourse.
The nal two elements, spectacle
(opsis) and music (melopoiia) or song are, in the strict sense, specic features of ancient Greek tragedy, but even here we
can nd parallels in other genres. The special effects and the sound track are obvious corollaries from modern lms,
but even purely literary genres can provide similarites: the careful evocation of the setting of Thomas Hardys Wessex
novels is indispensable to their effect and import, and music emerges both in the style and structure of Henry Jamess
prose ction and Tennysons verse. Because careful attention to these comparatively minor elementsprecise, vivid
diction, evocative representation of scenes, and compelling speech rhythmsis the key to literary impact, works of
nonction that are distinguished for beautiful or lively style are often counted as literature and thus survive after their
more pragmatic original function
has ceased to interest. Lucretiuss
De rerum natura would be at most a
footnote in the history of
philosophy if it were merely an
exposition of Epicureanism;
however, its powerful imagery and
the spell cast by the melody of its
hexameter verse have assured its
enduring signicance as a poem.
Similarly, many of Emersons
essays furnish a compelling, literary
experience of the life of the mind
even for readers who regard him
as singularly defective as a moralist, and one need not be a high-church Anglican to be enthralled by the prose of
Donnes sermons. There are also works that seem to be on the border of literature and some other discipline from the
outset. Platos dialogues are the indispensable foundation of Western philosophy, but some of the dialoguesthe
Symposium, for instance, and the Phaedrus seem to work as effectively as dramatic literature. The interpretation of Saint
Thomas Mores Utopia hinges, to a large extent, on whether it is treated as a treatise in political philosophy or a work of

VIRGIL (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70-19 b.c.e.), was born into the landed gentry
near Mantua, and, after receiving the standard rhetorical education of the day,
he declined to become a pleader in the courts of law and pursued philosophical
studies under the Epicurean Siro at Naples. His fathers land was expropriated
for distribution to veterans of Octavians army in the aftermath of the Civil
Wars, and tradition holds, somewhat implausibly, that Eclogues I celebrates the
restoration of these lands by the man who would be Virgils imperial patron as
a result of the intercession of the poets friends. There is no doubt that Virgil
enjoyed the friendship, as well as the patronage, of the Emperors advisor and
condant, Maecenas, who brought him to the attention of his master. Although
Virgil was thus a court poet, the grim account of the human cost of Aeneass
quest to lay the foundation of the Roman Empire and the pervasive melancholy
of the Aeneid suggest that the poem is hardly an uncritical celebration of
imperialism. According to Boswell, Dr. Johnson often used to quote, with
great pathos, lines from Virgils Georgics (III.66-68), which sadly recount how
wretched mans best days slip through his ngers, and he is undone by sickness,
age, labor, and ruthless death. Virgil is propagandist for no political platform.

CHAUCER , Geoffrey (ca. 1340-1400), was born into a family of prosperous
wine merchants, but by virtue of good education and innate gifts, he came to be
on familiar terms with nobles and kings. As a young man he was a courtly lover
and a soldier, taken prisoner by the French and subsequently ransomed in the
Hundred Years War. In his later years, he worked as a diplomat and a civil
servant and enjoyed the patronage of John of Gaunt as well as both Richard II
and Henry IV. His masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, is the fruit of a lifetime rich
in experience and observation of humanity. The surface tone of the work is a
detached, tolerant, and good-humored skepticism, yet there is nothing cynical in
Chaucer, whose work bespeaks not only wisdom but an abiding sympathy for his
fellow man born of a profound charity.

111

literature. This does not mean that the distinction between ction and nonction, between a poem and a treatise, is
negligible; it simply means that there is a broad grey area at the border. We know the difference between day and night,
but a long period of dusk makes it difficult to say when one ends and the other begins.

At the center of imaginative literature or poetry, then, is mimesis or imitation: the representation of human lifeor more
precisely, the representation of human experience. We are naturally curious creatures, but not merely in the manner of
cats and monkeys; our specically human curiosity is inspired by our consciousnessour awareness of the world around
us and of our selves as situated within it. This selfconsciousness necessarily entails a recognition of other selves, other
souls. The poet is important because, by expressing himself, he opens up to us the mind and heart of another, and the
knowledge of our likeness and difference from others is essential for our self-realization. The individual can only be
denedindeed, can only existin relation to other individuals. Thus while literature is the self-expression of the
author, it is also the representation of the reader. A uniquely personal vision representing nothing save the bards own
genius would fail to be intelligible as literature; by the same token, a purely subjective reading, which ignores the
structural and generic features of a work, which pays no heed to the intention inscribed in its intrinsic verbal substance,
would fail to be an interpretation of the work itself. Literaturelike the language from which it emergespresupposes a
communal culture, which in turn rests upon a common human nature.

The knowledge of human
nature and the human condition
that literature yields is the basis
of its educational role. A poet or
a novelist contributes to the
moral and social formation of
his readers less by providing
moral precepts or lessons in
citizenship than by shaping the
moral imagination. Literature,
then, is less concerned to assert
what is right and wrong than to
evoke the experience of good
and evil. Shakespeare does not
tell us that Edmund, in King
Lear, is evil. Instead, he unfolds
the layers of his villains
arrogance and self-pity, of his
ambition and envy; and he
allows him to make claims upon
both our sympathy and
fascination. Such is the peril of literature: one may choose to ignore the import of the drama as a whole and accept
Edmunds claim to be a victim. A character on a grander scale of wickednessthe Satan of Miltons Paradise Lost is
notorious for having attracted the favor of romantically inclined readers from Blake and Shelley to William Empson. But
if poetry is more dangerous than precept, it is also more powerful and engaging. The reader or theatrical spectator who
has felt the full impact of King Lear has a knowledge more profound and moving than the simple proposition that deceit,
betrayal, and murder are never justied; he will gain an emotional and imaginative revulsion at evil dressed up in bland
excuse and political pretext. He will have an inner resistance to collaboration with the Edmunds he meets in the world,
or to complicity with the Edmund who lurks within each of us.
Poets aim either to teach or delight, is Horaces famous dictum in The Art of Poetry, and Sir Philip Sidney renes the
saying by suggesting that teaching and delighting are bound up with one another: But it is that fayning notable images
of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet
by....5 Neither Horace nor Sidney is altogether free of the sugar-coated-pill theory of literary teaching; but, as the
quotation from the latter suggests, their best instincts tell them that the morality in poetry is built into the poetic essence
as such: [the] fayning notable images of vertues, vices, or what els is the poetry. As Sidney stresses, the power of
literature to teach is bound up with its power to represent the human experience of life, but life as it has meaning for us.

OVID (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 b.c.e. - c.e. 17), lacked the discretion (or the
connections or the luck) of Virgil and Horace, who could maintain both their
independence and the favor of the emperor. Ovids early erotic poetry, its
sensuality salted by witty self-mockery, seems designed to provoke respectable
opinion. About the time Virgils posthumous Aeneid, with its sombre portrayal of
patriotic self-sacrice, is appearing to universal acclaim, Ovid is suggesting that the
seducer of another mans wife, when he breaks down her door, outwits rivals, and
engages in a night attack, is also a soldier in loves war (Amores I.ix). This
classical version of Make love, not war! was bound to infuriate Augustus, whose
imperial program demanded a restoration of the patriotism and chastity of the
ancient Republic; when Ovid was involved in a scandal at courtpossibly
involving the Emperors notoriously promiscuous granddaughterAugustus
banished him for life to the howling wilderness of Pontus, on the Black Sea at the
edge of the Empire. Ovids grand, quasi-epic retelling of Greek myth in the
Metamorphoses and his celebration of Roman religious holidays in the Fasti were of
no avail. His nal poems, the Ex Ponte and the Tristia, are versied pleas for
clemency that met with stony silence from Augustus and his successor, Tiberius.
Romes gayest and most charming poet died in miserable exile.

112

Right Poets, he says, are like the more excellent painters, who, hauing no law but wit, bestow that in cullours vpon
you which is ttest for the eye to see: as the constant though lamenting looke of Lucrecia, when she punished in her
selfe an others fault; wherein he painteth not Lucrecia whom he neuer sawe, but painteth the outwarde beauty of such a
vertue.
6
Literature moves us by uniting goodness and beauty in our imagination; it seeks truth by means of ction.

In assessing the representational element in literature, it is important always to bear in mind that, excepting drama, it is
all done with words. Imaginative
literature puts enormous pressure
on language, with the salutary
result of expanding, enriching, and
rening the resources of that most
characteristic yet remarkable of
human traits. It is difficult to
conceive of men and women
without speech; hence we must
think of language less as a human
achievement than as a necessary
condition of humanity. Speech,
however, can develop or
degenerate: among numerous
other factors, the splendor of
Shakespearean drama is in part the
result of a tremendous growth in
the power and subtlety of the
English language in the course of
the fteenth and sixteenth
centuries. But the writing and
reading of poetry are a cause of
linguistic burgeoning as well as an
effect. Poetry is speech at its most
intense: it requires all the resources
of meaning and expression that a
language can provide, but it also contributes to the creation of those resources. It would thus be difficult to determine
whether the decline of Latin literature in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages resulted from a loss of complexity and
renement in the Latin language, or the language deteriorated because the poetry that was being written became cruder
and less imaginative. What can be said with certainty is that the study of literature requires the study of language, and
that a knowledge of any
language nally depends upon an
acquaintance with the literature in
which a language nds its most
thoughtful and vital articulation.
To be able to read critically,
reectively, and condently
requires wide reading in the great
literature that has formed the
linguistic culture of a society; and
eloquent writing requires a
fortiori a command of the most
powerful resources of a language,
which are only available, again, in
its most important literature.

SAKESPEARE, William (1564-1616), undoubtedly wrote the plays attributed to
him, and no more improbable substitute has been suggested than the current
favorite, the feckless seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Most great
writers are very intelligent, but they are usually not intellectuals, infrequently
scholars, and very rarely aristocratsLord Byron and Count Tolstoy are in a
decided minority. Shakespeare had all the education and experience he needed
because he was, in Henry Jamess phrase, a man on whom nothing was lost.
He was almost certainly reared Catholic at a time of increasing persecution of the
old faith on the part of Queen Elizabeths government. A growing body of
evidence suggests that he worked as a school master and journeyman actor in
Catholic households in the North of England during the lost years of the later
1580s, and this lends some probability to the report (or accusation) by a late
seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman that the playwright died a papist.
Shakespeares plays and poems, especially his mysterious Sonnets (1609), may be
safely assumed to grow out of his own experiences, interests, and longings; their
actual relationship to his life, however, cannot be determined with any certainty.
More than any other poet, Shakespeare created a secondary world of remarkable
depth and richness in a theatre ttingly called the Globe. His works, analogous to
the great work of creation itself, tell us unerringly that there is a creator behind
them, but they reveal almost nothing of his inner being. It is difficult to ascertain
how or why the world came into being, yet impossible to imagine it not being; it
is difficult to understand how anyone could have created Shakespeares dramatic
world, yet impossible to imagine it not being there.

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321), was born in Florence, but exiled in 1301 as
the result of a political vendetta while he was serving on an embassy to the Pope in
Rome. An idealist in politics as well as love, Dante steadfastly refused to make the
admissions or concessions that would win him a reprieve, and so he never set foot
in his native city again. The Divine Comedy is the work of an exile who knew the
bitter taste of another mans bread and the wearying steepness of his stairs (Paradiso
XVII.58-60). Dante was thus supremely tted to recognize that life on this earth is
exile, our true home in heaven. In Florences storied Santa Croce Church, which
holds the remains of luminaries such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, and
Rossini, there is an empty tomb and monument for Dante, who lies buried, still an
exile, in Ravenna.

113

The interrelationships among literatures of different languages, cultures, and ages dene the critical relationship between
history and literature. Although a poet is inevitably affected by the social and political setting in which he writes, the
crucial context of his work is the history of literature itself. Whatever the personal motives or public pressures that act
upon a writer, the denitive goal of his efforts is, recognizably, a work of literature. Swift never actually admits that A
Modest Proposal is a satire and not an actual scheme for using Irish infants as a foodstuff, and he never confesses that
Lemuel Gulliver is a made-up character whose Travels were spun out of Swifts own fertile fantasy. Likewise, Thomas
More appears to guarantee the authenticity of Raphael Hythlodaeuss account of a distant, perfectly ordered state by
introducing himself as an uncomfortable auditor into the text of Utopia. Only the most nave reader, however, would
doubt for a moment that these works are ctions, created by their authors to respond to and take their place among the
poems and stories of other authors. The relationship of literature to actual historyincluding an authors own
biographyis always important, but always oblique. For this reason, the place of literature in education is unique. It
involves a good deal of historical knowledge of persons, places, facts, dates, and the like; but these matters are, nally,
ancillary to the study of literature per se, which dwells in the realm of the human spirit. Even as a particular poem is a
structure of tension between author and reader, between a unique verbal form and the literary and linguistic conventions
that constitute its matrix, just so is literature itself (like all creations of the mind) an institution within but not wholly of
the ux of human history.

The history of literature is thus best pursued in terms of the emergence, development, and transformation of genres or
literary kinds. The difficulty of this approach is that genre, like literature itself, is an ambiguous term. There is
more than one principle for dividing up literary works into categories, and the generally recognized genres that have
emerged in the course of literary history are not always logically compatible. Most works draw on a variety of generic
conventions, and practically no memorable work ts comfortably into the denitions offered by scholarsone of the
marks of literary greatness is a testing of the conventional boundaries of the recognized genres. The conventions are not,
therefore, irrelevant or unimportant. Even in realistic novels, we unconsciously accept impossibly knowledgeable and
coherent narrative perspectives because the conventions of prose ction are part of our literary culture. And it is those
innovative authors who challenge or subvert the conventions who most depend upon them. Any reasonably literate
person can work out the conventions of the Victorian novel in the course of reading, but it requires a high degree of
critical sophisticationa conscious awareness that the usual means of story-telling have been discardedto respond to
the stream-of-consciousness narration of To the Lighthouse or the lack of a conventional plot in Waiting for Godot.

In the course of Western literary history, genres have developed in terms both of formal features and aspects of tone
and content, and the same term can be used to specify either a closely defined literary form or a general theme or
subject. Pure examples of specific genres are the exception rather than the rule. For example, much of the poetry of
Robert Frost may reasonably be
described as pastoral, but he did
not write formal pastorals on the
model of Theocrituss Idylls or
Virgils Eclogues or strict
Renaissance imitations like
Petrarchs Bucolicum carmen. Indeed,
many of the greatest literary
achievements grow out of an
authors re-imagining both the
generic form and the spiritual
vision of his great predecessors:
for example, an epic novela
prose narrative on a grand scale,
like Moby-Dick or War and Peace
can be seen as a modernized
version of the quest and conflict motifs of ancient epic as founded by Homer and Virgil. Genre, then, is an indispensable
literary concept as it applies both to the form of individual works and to the historical unfolding of literary tradition;
however, it would be foolish to bind particular poems, plays, and stories to generic models, as if they were so many beds
of Procrustes. One way of regarding a work of literature is to see it as a result of a poet coming to terms with the

DE CERVANTES , Miguel (1547-1616), lived a life plagued with misfortune.
Heroic service in the Battle of Lepanto (1571), which turned the tide in
Christendoms struggle against a growing Turkish threat, cost him his left eye and
the use of his left arm. In 1575 he was captured by Barbary pirates and languished
ve long years in an Algerian prison before being ransomed. He spent the rest of
his life eking out a meager living as a writer and minor government functionary.
He was more than fty when he attained his rst success with the rst part of
Don Quixote (1605), and even this work and its glorious second part (1615)
brought him little prosperity to match his fame. Cervantes, unlike Virgil and
Horace, endured extremely ill fortune in patronsthe noblemen to whom he
dedicated the rst and second parts of his masterpiece, and who would otherwise
be forgotten, were insensible to his genius and ignored him. The most inuential
work of Western ction brought its author lasting fame, but no worldly success.

114

conventions of his art and the limits of nature, while at the same time, in Sidneys grand phrase, freely ranging onely
within the Zodiack of his owne wit.
7
Or as T. S. Eliot says, literature represents a confrontation and convergence of
Tradition and the Individual Talent.
8

At the fountainhead of Western literature is the epic the story of a hero struggling against the constraints of the
human condition. Western
literatureand in some measure
Western culture and education
begins with the Iliad and the
Odyssey, traditionally ascribed to the
blind bard Homer, who probably
put the poems in roughly their
present form about seven centuries
before the birth of Christ.
Beginning in Athens and the other
Greek city-states at least as early as
the fth century B.C.E., the epics
of Homer have spread throughout
the Western world and been a
continuous inuence upon culture,
education, and literature even to
the present day. Of course the same argument could be made about the opening books of the Bible, especially Genesis
and Exodus, attributed to Moses. These books go back more than 1200 years before the birth of Christ, and they are
certainly epic in their theme and scope and in the grandeur of their style. The account of the Hebrews escape from
slavery in Egypt and their conquest of the Promised Land, for instance, is an undeniably epic tale. The books of the
Bible, however, have been preserved not as poetry, but rather as sacred history and revealed truth. Indeed, the survival
of classical literature, with its
idolatrous and often unedifying
mythology, was possible in a
severely Christian world largely
because the attitude of the ancient
Greeks and Romans toward their
gods and the stories about them
never involved the rigorous claims
of truth that Christians and Jews
attach to their Scriptures. Although
the inuence of the Bible on
Western culture is thus as great as
that of Homer and all of Greek
and Roman literature combined, it
is an inuence of a different order.
Until the last two or three
centuries, almost no one would
have thought of Exodus as
poetry in the same way as the
Iliad.

It is the Iliad, the tale of the wrath of Achilles in the tenth and nal year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its companion
piece, the Odyssey, which recounts the ten-year quest of the hero Odysseus to return to his homeland, that dene the
characteristics of the epic for the Western literary tradition. These characteristics will be familiar to most students who
have read a few fragments of the Odyssey or the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost in a literature anthology. An epic is a
poem about a great quest or conict that involves the destiny of nations. Its characters are of imposing staturegods
and heroesits style is grand and dignied, its setting encompasses heaven and earth, and it deploys specic epic

DONNE, John (1572-1631), son of Saint Thomas Mores great niece and with
two Jesuit uncles, was reared as a Catholic recusant (refuser) in a time of
increasing persecution. His bold and witty early love poems, as well as his satires,
were a provocation to Protestant respectability in Elizabethan England in the
same fashion that Ovid affronted respectable society in Augustan Rome. Donne,
whose personae in his love poems often assume the pose of a cynical seducer,
threw away all his worldly prospects to elope with the seventeen-year-old
daughter of a wealthy country gentleman. After ten years of poverty on the
margins of Jacobean society, Donne found a way to reconcile his conscience with
membership in the Church of England. He became a clergyman and eventually
Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral. His spiritual struggles produced some of the most
powerful devotional poetry in English, and his sermons and Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions are among the glories of English prose.

MILTON , John (1608-1674), was a truly learned poet in academic terms, who
also traveled widely and was directly involved in the most important political and
religious affairs of his day. His major works are, predictably, learned and overtly
engaged with the leading issues of his society. The case of Milton shows us the
kind of works that the unlearned Shakespeare would have produced had he
enjoyed the extensive formal education and worldly advantages that disdainers of
the man from Stratford think he should have had in order to write his plays
and sonnetswhich in fact are rather popular and earthy in tone and style in
contrast to Miltons highly intellectual and scholarly poetry. Milton in fact
displays all the perversity of a radical intellectual. His Christmas poem, On the
Morning of Christs Nativity, virtually ignores the tenderness and affectivity of
the manger scene and compares the Baby Jesus to the serpent-strangling infant
Hercules in what has been called an epic Christmas carol. In Comus Milton
uses the masquea genre notorious as a pretext for song, dance, sumptuous later
imperial era. Yet as long as the works of Shakespeare and other great English
writers are available, the genius of the languageits responsiveness to the powers
of imaginationwill remain.

115

devices like the extended Homeric simile and the catalogue of warriors. And so on. This standard description is certainly
unexceptionable as far as it goes, but it leaves out the speed of the narration, the clean simplicity of the style (grand
must not be allowed to suggest heavy or stodgy), the vivid humanity of the heroic characters, and above all the
tight focus of the plot not on the fate of peoples, but on the passionate struggles of individual men and women. The
Iliad picks up in the tenth year of the war and begins with tawdry quarrels over captive concubines. It ends not with the
wooden horse and the sack of Troy, but with the brutal and tragic slaying of Hector and the sure knowledge that his
conqueror Achilles will soon follow him to an early grave. The Odyssey likewise begins in medias res in the nal year of the
heros quest, and its focus is on his very personal story: a man trying to come home after a war to be reunited with his
wife and son. Homer has endured because he has told with surpassing beauty, but also with unflinching moral realism,
stories that still resonate in our minds and hearts. The Western world has produced three other epics that are essential to
a liberal education. Virgils Aeneid, Dantes Divine Comedy, and Miltons Paradise Lost. Although Homer was the rst
epic poet, there can be no doubt that Virgil exerted a greater direct inuence on the development of the literary
tradition. After the gradual disintegration of the Roman Empire, Western Europe was generally ignorant of Greek, and
Homers works were known largely by report. Virgil, however, was read throughout the Middle Ages and exercised an
incalculable inuence on an enormous variety of writers over the next 2,000 years down to our own day. In contrast to
the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid is a reective poem about a hero of self-renunciation. A reluctant warrior, pius
Aeneas always pays reverence to the gods and to his destiny; he always does his duty. But while Virgil celebrates the
triumphant origins of the grandeur that will be Rome, he also ruefully acknowledges the bitter anguish that bloody
triumph costs. Virgil is so intensely aware of human limitations, so profoundly concerned with the spiritual trials of his
hero, that it is no wonder that he was long regarded as half-Christian. That the central epic of the Western literary
tradition is full of ambiguity and doubt about conquest and warfare suggests that European culture is less an unthinking
exercise in triumphalist hegemony than many surmise.

The place of Virgil in Western literature and civilization is indicated by the next indispensable epic of that tradition: in
the Divine Comedy, Dante takes
the character Virgil as his
mentor and guide through hell
and purgatory during the rst two-
thirds of the poem. His
understanding of literary style and
his aspiration are shaped by the
poet Virgil, and it is Dantes
explicit intention to join Virgil and
his classical predecessors in the
exclusive circle of culture-dening
poets and philosophers. As Homer is taken to be an expression of the Greek heroic age and Virgil of the Roman
Empire, so Dante is often read and taught as the embodiment of the medieval worldview, and especially of the
Thomistic theological synthesis. Naturally, there is an element of truth in these propositions, but they are still supercial
clichs. Dantes Comedy is certainly a vivid depiction of many aspects of his worldpolitical, religious, socialand it
brings to the fore both the philosophical outlook he derived from the thinkers of his era (including Saint Thomas
Aquinas) and his bitter personal experience. But the poem is above all a dramatization of a mans self-discovery and
quest for salvationthe restoration of that self. His journey involves the confrontation with sin, the experience of
penitence, and the glory of reconciliation with God. The terms of the poem are irreducibly Christian, and it is otherwise
unintelligible; however, the Christian account of the human situation is sufficiently resonant to adherents of other
religions or of no religion at all for Dantes poem to engage their intellects and touch their hearts. In the course of
creating in the Tuscan vernacular a style to challenge Virgils Latin, Dante, with his younger contemporary Petrarch, laid
the groundwork of the modern Italian language. In this feat is manifest the intimate and essential relationship between
language and literature, which was so signicant to Renaissance humanism: by the act of literary creation a language and
thus a culture achieves a kind of permanence and ideal realization. As it becomes the Esperanto of the global
marketplace, English is showing the same wear and tear and debasement that Latin suffered in the

BUNYAN , John (1628-1688), was the son of a tinsmith who learned to read and
write at a village school. A veteran of the Parliamentary Army during the Civil
War, Bunyan joined a Nonconformist church in the 1650s and became a powerful
Calvinist preacher. With the Restoration of the monarchy and established church
in 1660, unlicensed preaching became a crime, and Bunyan was jailed twice, the
rst time for more than twelve years. The fruit of the second of his
imprisonments was The Pilgrims Progress, an allegory of sin and redemption that
has appealed to Christians of every persuasion.

116

One of the writers who expanded the capacities of the English language is John Milton, author of the last great Western
epic. In Milton, as in Dante, the inuence of Virgil is prominent, and the closest a reader of English can get to the verbal
feel of the epic hexameters of the Aeneid without reading it in Latin is to read the blank verse of Paradise Lost. There
is no poem in English that better exemplies the heroic dignity of the grand style, and it is one of the costumes, and
elaborate stage setsas a vehicle for the exposition of an austere Christian Neoplatonism. Although he was the most
important poet of the seventeenth century, Milton devoted his prime middle years to political and religious controversy
in prose. He won the admiration of Puritans by attacking the liturgy and episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England
and lost it by supporting the legalization of divorce (Miltons rst marriage, to a seventeen-year-old royalist, was not a
happy one). His vigorous defense of the execution of Charles I favorably impressed Cromwell, and the poet served for a
number of years in the Lord Protectors Interregnum government. It was only after the Restoration of Charles II and the
bishops of the Church of England, when Milton had lost his political hopes, his standing in society, and even his
eyesight that he wrote those works on biblical themes in classical form that established him among the worlds greatest
poets: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. paradoxes of literature that one language can be served
so well by bending it to the imperatives of another. It is the measure of Miltons insight and taste that he so unerringly
knows exactly how far he can craft English verse to the turns of Latinate diction and syntax in the pursuit of Things
unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime (I.16). What Milton does with the thematic substance of epic is another paradox.
Paradise Lost is, indisputably, a great epic poem of classical style and heroic scale, and yet it not only is the last epic; it
may also be said to have nished off the epic. The epic catalogues are mostly lists of fallen angels; the character who is
most consistently heroic in word and action and attitude is Satan. Most telling, the only epic battle in the entire poem
the War in Heaven in Book VIis inconsequential and borders at times on the comic, since none of the angels are able
to suffer serious injury, much less death, because of their ethereal substance. Whether Milton is shaping a new vision of
the heroic military virtues in terms of inner, spiritual strength or simply rejecting them is a question that scholars
continue to debate. In any case, no one in the Western world has been able to write a genuine or unqualied epic since.

Of course there have been
numerous important poems that
make us think of epics: mock
epics, like Drydens Mac Flecknoe
and Absalom and Achitophel and
Popes Rape of the Lock and
Dunciad, apply epic conventions to
the trivial or ridiculous with satiric
intent. Romantic epics, like
Wordsworths Prelude, Byrons
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage and Don
Juan, and Whitmans Song of Myself
(indeed, the entirety of Leaves of
Grass) treat the subjective
experience of their equivocal
heroes in quasi-epic terms.

Among the many other ancient
long poems that are worth
whatever time a student can nd
for them, mention has been made
already of Lucretiuss On the Nature
of Things, but the one indispensable
poem among them all is Ovids
Metamorphoses, an elaborate retelling of a vast array of Greek myths involving change of form. The most important source
of ancient mythology for medieval and Renaissance writers, the Metamorphoses is also a unique work of both sparkling
sophistication and deep feeling. From the Middle Ages, the essential long work of poetry besides Dantes Comedy is
Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales, a collection of comic tales in rhyming couplets. Another remarkable collection of
comic tales from the Middle Ages is Giovanni Boccaccios prose Decameron, while Franois Rabelaiss Gargantua and

POPE, Alexander (1688-1744), was born a Roman Catholic in the year of the
Glorious Revolution that expelled James II, put William III on the throne of
England, secured the real sovereignty for Parliament, and ended any hope of a
Catholic restoration. Although he consorted with skeptical rationalists and could
have enjoyed numerous benets (e.g., government sinecures) by nominally
conforming to the established church, Pope remained true to his faith until his
death. He suffered physical as well as religious disabilities: tuberculosis of the
spine contracted as a child turned him into a hunchback who never grew much
over four feet tall. His chronic ill health produced his famous phrase, This long
disease, my life (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 132). Pope compensated by
becoming the rst English author to earn a substantial living by publishing his
work. The great success of his translation of the Iliad into heroic couplets won
him nancial independence and retirement at a modest rural estate. Popes heroic
couplets are often regarded as the poetic expression of Enlightenment
rationalism, but, as William Wimsatt decisively demonstrates, rhyme is inherently
antirationalist in its juxtapositioning of words on the basis of sound alone. Popes
work has more in common with the poetry of wit of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries than with the cool skepticism of a Voltaire or Diderot. It is
not surprising, therefore, that Pope eschewed the symmetrical formalism of
French gardens at his Twickenham estate in favor of the natural garden that
foreshadowed Romanticism.

117

Pantagruel is an unclassiable narrative, also in prose, which reects the mischievous, satirical side of humanist learning
also seen in Desiderius Erasmuss Praise of Folly and Thomas Mores Utopia.

Drama is the most social or
communal art, because the
individual dramatist is altogether
dependent upon a host of
collaborators to see his work
realized, and periods of great drama
are understandably rare. There is no
dispute about the origin of Western
drama in festivals of Dionysius in
Athens during the fth century
before the birth of Christ. The plays
that have survived from that
centurythe tragedies of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides and the
comedies of Aristophanesare the rst dramatic works of our tradition and they are arguably the best. Two millennia
will pass before anything comparable emerges. It is late in the Renaissance, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
that we come upon the next great wave of theatrical genius in England, France, and Spain. The greatest of these
dramatists, certainly the greatest
dramatist of all time and possibly
the greatest writer, is William
Shakespeare. Ideally, every English-
speaking student should read all of
his plays and poems, but a bare
minimum would include the second
Henriad (Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry
IV, and Henry V ), a selection of his
mature romantic comedies (The
Merchant of Venice, As You Like It,
Twelfth Night), his late romance, The
Tempest, and the greatest of the
tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and
Antony and Cleopatra. Among
Shakespeares English
contemporaries, Christopher
Marlowes Dr. Faustus and at least a
few of Ben Jonsons comediesfor
example, Volpone and The Alchemistshould not be missed. Seventeenth-century France boasts its great triumvirate: the
tragedians Corneille and Racine and the

AUSTEN, Jane (1775-1817), was the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of
England. She never married and lived with her family throughout her apparently
uneventful life, thus giving the lie to the notion that powerful writers must have
wide experience of the world, extensive education, and deal with great events
(she never mentions the French Revolution or Napoleon). Writing about the
domestic affairs of the rural gentry and village shopkeepers and the marital
aspirations of their daughtersthe little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on
which I work with so ne a brush as produces little effect after much labor is
her own description of her literary mtierJane Austen captures a vision of
ordinary life in society that is unsentimental, ironic, and morally acute. She is, as
C. S. Lewis opines, less the mother of Henry James than the niece of Dr.
Johnsona classical mind in the age of Romanticism.

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), who as a young man was a
romantic visionary like his friend Wordsworth, was inspired by the French
Revolution and the prospect of the imminent reform of the world. By the time
their joint production, Lyrical Ballads, appeared in
1798, both men were growing disillusioned by the excesses of the Revolution
and both would become increasingly conservative as they grew older.
Coleridges chief contribution to Lyrical Ballads, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, is among the most remarkable poems in English, but by 1802 he was
lamenting the loss of his poetic powers in
Dejection: An Ode, a paradoxically splendid poem on the inability to write
poetry. Coleridges muse was in fact departing, as he slid into despondency over
his unhappy marriage to Sarah Fricker and his futile love for Wordsworths
sister-in-law. His life was also bedeviled for many years by addiction to opium,
which he began taking for medicinal purposes. He compensated for his failing
powers as a poet by becoming the greatest English literary critic since Johnson.
Biographia Literaria
(1817) is his principal theoretical work.

118

comedian Molire. For Corneille, Le Cid is the obvious choice; for Racine, Andromache or Phaedra; for Molire, The
Misanthrope or Tartuffe. Spanish Golden-Age drama the theatre of Cervantes
contemporariesis an undiscovered treasure for most
Americans. Lope de Vega is notable for his prodigious fecundity rather than for any one outstanding play. His younger
contemporary, Caldern de la Barca, was also remarkably productive, but his Life Is a Dream stands out as perhaps the
most powerful and representative baroque drama, while The Prodigious Magician is a fascinating version of the Faust
legend. Tirso de Molina is known for one extremely powerful and inuential play, The Joker of Seville and the Dinner
Guest of Stone, the earliest theatrical treatment of the Don Juan legend.

Claims may be made for Congreve during the period of the Restoration and for Sheridan, Beaumarchais, and Schiller
during the eighteenth century, but the one indisputable dramatic masterpiece since the Renaissance is Goethes Faust.
Perhaps more of a dramatic epic than a conventional stage play, Faust is probably the greatest single work of
Romanticism and of German literature. Its place at the summit of world literature results from its unique blend of
stylistic power, dramatic characterization, and philosophical depth and sophistication. Norways Henrik Ibsen is
probably the indispensable dramatist at the beginning of the modern period, but claims could be made for George
Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Eugne Ionesco, and Luigi Pirandello.

The dominant literary form of the twentieth century is prose ction, especially the novel. Although it is by no means the
earliest piece of extended prose ction, the novel may be said to begin with Miguel de Cervantess Don Quixote, written in
the early seventeenth century, which denes itself precisely as a narrative of naturally explicable events among
recognizable characters of
everyday life, as opposed to the
fantastic exploits and magical
escapades of chivalric romance.
The central characters generally
futile efforts to dwell in the
enchanted realm of unfettered
fancy are thus instrumental in
laying down the realistic
boundaries of the workaday world
in which this new form, the novel,
typically takes place. The realism
associated with the novel (and the
short story) refers principally to
the accurate and convincing
evocation of the concrete features
of an ordinary world inhabited by
recognizable human beings. Even
a science ction novel (as opposed
to a work of fantasy) attempts to create a plausibly factual world of the future by extrapolating from current scientic
fact and theory. Works of fantasyfrom Beowulf to The Faerie Queene to The Lord of the Ringsalthough they include
purely imaginary features (enchanted lakes, dragons, elves) may, nonetheless, be works of powerful moral and spiritual
realism. Realism in this latter sense is not, however, a strictly literary term denoting a generic characteristic. The genius
of Don Quixote lies in its dwelling in the territory of rigorous realism while glancing continuously and longingly at the
ideal kingdom of chivalric imagination, thus merging realism in its literary and moral senses. Cervantess most effective
early disciples in the development of the novel as a realist genre were eighteenth-century Englishmen, and among their
novels the most important are probably Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe, Henry Fieldings Tom Jones, and Laurence
Sternes Tristram Shandy. The great age of the novel is the nineteenth century, and England again boasts a remarkable
galaxy of ction writers. At the turn of the century Jane Austen created six exquisitely crafted comedies of manners that
combine sparkling style, keen irony, and profound moral insight. Pride and Prejudice may have been displaced as the most
important by Emma as the result of a urry of excellent cinematic adaptations. Among the great Victorian novels,
Dickenss David Coppereld, Bleak House, and Great Expectations; Thackerays Vanity Fair; George Eliots Middlemarch and
Mill on the Floss; and Trollopes Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now would seem to be indispensable. In America,

JOHNSON, Samuel (1709-1784), was the son of a bookseller whose death in
1731 left his family in poverty before his son could nish his degree at Oxford.
Sickly as a child and suffering ill health all his life after years of deprivation and
failure, by dint of perseverance and intellectual effort Johnson made himself into
the most important English man of letters of the later eighteenth century. He is
famous not for a particular great work of literature, but for his overall
achievement. He compiled the rst dictionary of the English language (1755), was
important in the development of the essay and periodical literature, wrote a
number of ne poems and an engaging philosophical romance (Rasselas, 1759),
collaborated with James Boswell on an important work of travel literature,
produced an edition of Shakespeare (1765) that is a landmark in textual editing
and interpretive commentary, and laid the foundation for literary biography in
The Lives of the Poets (1779-81). Johnson is himself the subject of the greatest
biography in English, Boswells Life of Johnson (1791), which records his wit,
wisdom, and deep compassion, often concealed by a gruff exterior.

119

Melvilles very long Moby-Dick and very short Billy Budd and Mark Twains wonderful Huckleberry Finn are
contemporaneous achievements. Whether Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and Nathaniel Hawthornes Scarlet Letter should be
classied as novels or gothic romances, they are both books that should not be missed. In France the three great
nineteenth-century novelists are Victor Hugo, especially for Les Misrables, Honor de Balzac, especially for Pre Goriot,
and Gustave Flaubert, especially for Madame Bovarie. But it may be Russia that has the strongest claim to have produced
the greatest novels of all time in Leo Tolstoys Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Fyodor Dostoyevskys Crime and
Punishment and Brothers Karamazov, and Ivan Turgenevs Fathers and Sons.

In England Heart of Darkness and
other works by the transplanted
Pole, Joseph Conrad, and the late
novels of the transplanted
American, Henry James, mark the
beginning of the twentieth century.
The three great names of high
modernist ction in the rst half of
the twentieth century are the
Irishman James Joyce, the
Frenchman Marcel Proust, and the
German Thomas Mann, whose
characteristic works, Ulysses,
Remembrance of Things Past, and The
Magic Mountain, respectively, are
marked by a preoccupation with
alienated subjective consciousness
and innovative technical virtuosity that renders their work very difficultif not inaccessibleto most readers. Joyces
greatest disciple, and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, is William Faulkner in works like The Sound
and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Yet the most enduring novelist of the early twentieth century, although she lacks
academic cachet at the present, may
be Sigrid Undset for her
multivolume historical works,
Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of
Hestviken. Perhaps no one comes
closer to the great nineteenth-
century Russians in achieving the
esssential task of the novelist: to
shape a complex, compelling
narrative, peopled with convincing
characters, and transgured by
profound spiritual signicance.

It remains to mention the various
genres of shorter poems: pastorals,
satires, epigrams, and the lyric.
While the extended narrative
worksepic poetry and the
novelinvolve telling a story about
various characters by means of a
third-person narration, and drama
by means of rst-person dialogue
among the characters, the typical
shorter poem seems to be the
utterance of the poet himself, speaking or singing his own thoughts or feelings. Certainly part of the power of both

UNDSET , Sigrid (1882-1949), was the daughter of a Norwegian
archaeologista lineage which may in part account for the scrupulous historical
accuracy of her treatment of medieval Norway in her historical ction. Her life
was marked by great sorrows, including divorce from her artist husband and the
death of one of her sons in battle against the Nazis in the early stages of World
War II; her novels give a generally grim view of human sinfulness and the
struggle against passion. Undsets depictions of modern life are especially bleak,
but her reputation rests on two massive ctional treatments of medieval
Norway: The trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22), and the tetralogy The Master
of Hestviken (1925-27). It was after publication of the former that she was
received into the Catholic Church in 1924. Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize
(1928) largely on the basis of her historical novels, but her novels in modern
settings are also ne works, and she was an excellent essayist on historical,
social, and religious themes.

ELIOT, T. S. (1888-1965), was born in St. Louis of a prominent family
descended of early New England settlers, and he could trace his lineage back to
the Tudor humanist, Sir Thomas Elyot. He went to England and France to
complete work on a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy, but eventually
abandoned philosophy for poetry and never took his degree, settling
permanently in England in 1915. The publication of The Waste Land in 1922 was
one of the seminal events of twentieth-century literature, comparable in its effect
to the rst performance of Stravinskys The Rite of Spring or Picassos cubist
paintings. With this single poem, deploying numerous literary allusions and a
dense, difficult stream-of-consciousness technique, Eliots fame and notoriety
were established. He seemed to be mounting a radical attack on the impersonal
industrial society from which modern man feels a deep sense of alienation;
hence it was a great shock to the intellectual world when, in 1928, having just
become a British citizen, Eliot proclaimed himself a classicist in literature, a
royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. Over the succeeding
decades he would establish himself as the most important modern literary critic
of the English-speaking world and an important conservative commentator on
religious and cultural affairs. His efforts to reestablish verse drama in plays like
Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party have attained, at best, mixed success;
however, in works like Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, he has offered the nest
devotional poetry of our century.

120

lyrical and satirical poetry is a sense of intimacy with the poet, of gazing through a window into a creative mind. This
preoccupation with the actual, historical poet is, however, an illusion and a distraction from the poetry itself, which is
always a ction, always a representation. Once a poet has set about to compose a poem (something made), the sense of
sincerity and spontaneity are part of the ction. The poet is playing a role, assuming a voice, creating a persona, even if
the poem has been inspired directly by his own personal experience. Persona, in Latin the mask worn by actors in
Roman drama, is the literary term of art for precisely the mask or countenance the poet puts on and hides behind in
order to provide a vehicle for the emotion and insight that must be detached from his own private experience in order to
become part of ours. Hence even if someone discovers indisputable evidence of the identity of Mr. W. H. or proves
that there really was a Dark Lady in Shakespeares actual life, these facts about the poet will not settle the
interpretation of the poetry of the Sonnets.

Since the shorter poetic forms are even more dependent than drama and narrative on nuances of style, it is very difficult
to get any sense of the power and beauty of translated lyrics, epigrams, or satires. A few poets are so critical to
understanding the development of Western culture, not to say literature, that they must be known, even if only in
translation. Among these I would include the surviving lyrics of Sappho, at least a few of the lyrics of Catullus, Ovids
Amores, and, above all, Petrarchs sonnets to Laura, which are crucial to our complex and equivocal ideas of sexual love
even to this day. Equally important are the Odes (Carmina) of Horace, which are one of the principal sources of the idea of
the virtuous, modest, but independent country lifea perennial theme in Anglo-American literature; his satires, which
supply both the classic image of the inescapable bore and the earliest version of the Country Mouse/City Mouse story;
and the satires of Juvenal, which provide an inuential condemnation of corrupt urban life, the idea of the Vanity of
Human Wishes (in Dr. Johnsons English adaptation), and the telling satirists phrase, savage indignation.

There are many beautiful medieval lyrics, but the great tradition of the English lyric begins with Wyatt and Surrey early
in the sixteenth century. Sidneys Astrophil and Stella, Spensers Amoretti (along with his Epithalamionthe finest
wedding song in any language), and Shakespeares Sonnets are the best English sonnet sequences. The seventeenth
century is a treasure trove of lyrical poetry. John Donnes Songs and Sonets, his Satyres, Holy Sonnets, and Hymns are at
the top of the list along with the minor poems of John Milton. Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell
wrote exquisite lyrics and poems of reflection; George Herberts The Temple is the finest collection of religious lyrics in
English, but Crashaws Carmen Deo Nostro and Henry Vaughans Silex Scintillans are worthy successors. John Dryden,
already mentioned as an author of mock epic, produced two of the best works of religio-political satire in Religio Laici
and the very much underrated The Hind and the Panther. Dryden lays the foundation for the tremendous achievement in
satire and mock epic of Alexander Pope, who dominates the eighteenth century. The next great burst of lyrical poetry
comes with the Romantic Movement: Blakes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Coleridges Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, and the great odes of Shelley and Keats are among the most memorable of English poems. Wordsworth and
Byron, mentioned for their variations on epic, also wrote many ne lyrics. The Victorian successors to the Romantics
(most notably Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold) all produced poemsUlysses, My Last Duchess, and
Dover Beach immediately spring to mindthat everyone should know. Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose work
remained unpublished for almost thirty years after his death, was the greatest English devotional poet since Herbert. The
rst great American poets come late in the nineteenth century: the reclusive spinster Emily Dickinson and the
bumptious, self-educated and self-promoting Walt Whitman. William Butler Yeats may well be the greatest poet to write
in English in the twentieth century, and I would add Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.

All the authors and works that I have mentioned are worth reading, and every educated man and woman will wish to
have at least a passing acquaintance with almost all of them; but of course these are works that require (and repay!) close
attention and repeated readings. Still, much of ones reading should be for pleasure, and everyone will have a personal
interest in certain books and authors because of sympathy with their religious or ethnic attachments or their
philosophical or political views. Such interests ought to be pursued, but all ones reading will be enhanced by a sense of
the overall contours of Western literature and by an acquaintance with its greatest monuments. Readers, like authors,
need to know where they stand in relation to the past in order to live fully in the present; they need to recognize the
genius of others in order to realize their own.

NOTES:

121

1. Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. (New York: Norton, 1986, 5th Ed., II), 864.

2. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchison (London:
Oxford Univeristy Press, 1969), 737.

3. Ren Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 142-57.

4. There are, to be sure, twentieth-century poems that are quite long, but no one, I think, has ever found a coherent
story in Ezra Pounds Cantos or David Joness Anathmata.

5. An Apologie for Poetrie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: Oxford University Press,
1904), 1, 160.

6. Ibid., 159.

7. Ibid., 156.

8. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 47-59.

122

123

VII. Response & Analysis
Teaching Literature in Secondary School
(Excerpt)

Second Edition

Robert E. Probst

124

About ten years ago, Louise Rosenblatt, while sitting in Princeton, New Jersey, talked with fifty teachers and me as we
huddled around a speakerphone in Anchorage, Alaska. During the conversation, Dr. Rosenblatt made the remark that
she had written Literature as Exploration as a defense of democracy. "
I wasnt sure what she meant at the time, and may not fully grasp it even now.
I think, though, that she meant that we have to learn to read both our texts and the world responsively and responsibly if
were to preserve democratic processes. That is to say, we must not simply submit to texts, accepting too easily what
they offer us, following them too willingly wherever they would take us. Rather, we have to bring those texts to bear
upon our lives, and our lives to bear upon the texts, reflecting conscientiously upon the experience, attitudes, and ideas
that emerge from our reading, analyzing both the text and ourselves, continually rethinking who we are, what we believe
and value, and where we stand in the world. Literature offers us the chance to do that thinking. If our students learn to
read in that way, they may be able to exercise some control over their lives and participate in the free thought necessary
for a democracy; if they dont, theyre prepared only to follow, accepting someone elses decisions and judgments.
This book is an effort to figure out how we might teach that responsive and responsible reading in the secondary
schools, grades six through twelve.
Whatever changes have found their way into this revised edition I owe to a great many people from whom Ive learned,
borrowed, and stolen. Louise Rosenblatt is still the foundation; her theory is as strong and vital now as it was when she
first articulated it almost 70 years ago. Many others, however, have helped me explore it and have shown me, more
clearly than I otherwise could have seen, what it means
in the classroom and in a democratic society: R. Baird Shuman led me to first explore these ideas; Kylene Beers taught
me everything I know (a small part of what she knows) about working with kids who have difficulty reading; Ken
Holmes showed me skillful and sensitive teaching of less privileged students in an impoverished inner-city; Joan Wynne
helped me tremendously to better understand African-American and Latino students; Hal Foster demonstrated for me
how universities and schools can work together; and there are many others (too many to name), including the teachers
studying at Georgia State University who put up with my experiments in the classroom and shared their own with me,
and countless middle and high school students around the country who have helped immensely, although they may not
know it.

125

I would also like to thank Lisa Luedeke, who diligently kept after me to get this revision completedit would never
have happened without her support and encouragementand the others at Heinemann who work so hard to bring a
book together. In many ways, its been a group project, although Im responsible for the misspelled words and other
errors.

Bob Probst Marathon, Florida July 2, 2004

126

127

Chapter 3
The Reader and Other Readers

You usually dont go to a movie alone. Not, in any case, if theres someone else around whod like to see it, too. Its just
more fun to share the popcorn and to have someone else to talk with about the movie afterwards.
If its a good movie, youll have much to say, questions to ask, scenes to talk about; if it isnt, youll have complaints
youll want to share with someone. Youd rather not go to a movie, watch it, and then go home, take out the trash, wash
the dishes, and pay your bills. A great movie, even just a good movieeven a bad movie, for that matterdemands
discussion. You need to sit down and talk about it.
Talk is called for. You dont walk out of the theater thinking, I sure wish my old English teacher, Ms. Riley, was (or did
she say it should be were?) here to give me one of those devious ten-question multiple-choice or true-false or fill-in-the-
blank quizzes she used to give us every other day to make sure wed done our homework, because I know Id knock it
I paid attention; I caught every nuance, every detail; I know the plot, the characters, the cinematic techniques, the pacing,
the tone, the theme, the style, everything about this movie. Id get 100 percent, an A+. Shed be so proud of me shed
write a note home telling my parents that I was a model student and that they should raise my allowance and give me
back my drivers license. Shed start drafting my letters of recommendation to Oxford and the Sorbonne. No, you
dont think those thoughts. Nor, on the other hand, if it were (or was?) a confusing moviesomething like Memento,
with its recursive structure, starting and backing up, retracing its steps, going over the same events again and againdo
you walk into the lobby and call out, Is there an English teacher in the house? hoping that one will step forward
proudly and proclaim, I am here! What is it you need dissected,
vivisected, analyzed, explicated, and made crystal clear?
No, what you do is head to the nearest coffeehouse, sit down
with your friend or friends, order a drink, and talk, just talk. You
compare notes, tell them what you liked, ask them about what
confused you, argue about whether Bruce Willis or Anthony
Hopkins might have been better in that role than Hal Foster
(probably not). Good movies, and good books, want to be
talked about.
But it doesnt usually happen. Not outside of the classroom, in
any case. Kylene may give me a book that she loved, but by the
time Ive read it and get back to Houston shes moved on and
read twelve other books. I pass it along to Hal, but he goes off
to Akron and we dont talk until Im deep into something
Kathleen sent me so I cant remember the issues hed like to
discuss. There arent enough people reading the same thing at
the same time.

Except in English classes. There you have a rare opportunity.
You have thirty kids and a book. You can talk.
Chapter 2 was about what happens when someone reads and
reflects upon a literary work; it focused on the individual
response to a text. Good reading, it was argued, is neither submission nor arrogance. That is to say, it is not simply a
matter of absorbing the work, receiving it as one receives the comfort of a warm shower. Nor, on the other hand, is it an
opportunity either to loose ones unconsidered opinions upon others or to indulge in quiet self-deception. Rather, it is a
matter of responding to the text and of thinking carefully about both the response and the words on the page in order to
understand both oneself and the work better. This notion of good reading recognizes limitations to any one persons
knowledge and experience, and asserts that those limitations, that particular point of view, necessarily shape the
understanding of the text. In this chapter well look at the relationships among readers.
In the discussion of the Jones poem, As Best She Could, we examined how various readers points of view might
shape their readings of the poem and how reading the poem might in turn shape the points of view. People will read the
poem differently, and if

View of a Pig - Ted
Hughes
The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.
Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.
I thumped it without feeling remorse.
One feels []

128

they read carefully and thoughtfully, they will be slightly different people when they finish reading. The Hughes poem
A View of a Pig provided an illustration of the transition from response to analysis, showing how the responses of
students could raise questions that compel them to look closely at the words on the page for answers. So far, the
discussion has concentrated on the individuals private reading of the work, her transaction, as Louise Rosenblatt calls it,
with the text.
Once students are beyond the schools reach, their reading is likely to be not only private, but also independent and
solitary, unassisted by any other readers. They probably will not search out book discussion groups or critical essays to
help them think through their experiences with literature. While in school, however, they have the opportunity to invite
others into the private exchange between work and self. Other readers can help tremendously by calling attention to
different readings, alternatives they might not otherwise have noticed. It is with this opportunity that this chapter is
concerned.
The opportunity to read in company with others is not without its drawbacks. Though the group provides a variety of
insights and responses to work with, it demands tolerance of occasional digressions and ramblings; though it provides a
forum for your own thoughts, it demands that you share the platform with others; though it provides feedback for those
who speak, it allows a retreat into anonymity for the timid ones; and though it may provide much stimulation for
thought, it may also intrude disruptively into the private meditations that are part of the personal and solitary act of
reading. Individual students may find themselves lost in the crowd, with little chance to express their thoughts, or
perhaps even to think them. With other subjects the problem may not be so acute, but the teaching of literature must be
grounded in the students responses to the text, so they need the opportunity to articulate those responses. The ideas
and concepts in the literature classroom do not have identity and substance independent of the students; rather, they are
produced by the students as they interact with the text. Unless students read and respond, there is no literature to
teachonly texts and information about texts. The unresponsive student of algebra may grasp its basic principles, and
the indifferent student of history may begin to comprehend the sequence and the rationale of events, but the student of
literature who hides in the crowd or parrots the thinking of classmates, who learns only to paraphrase the critical
judgments of scholars or to memorize peripheral information about authors lives and historical periods, has not begun
to learn the literature. Those parroted observations and memorized judgments reflect not less learning, but no learning
whatsoever. They indicate that the student has failed to confront the literature and test himself against it. Insofar as the
classroom permits students to avoid dealing with responses, it permits them to ignore the literature.
So the classroom may help or hurt, and the teachers job is to manage it in such a way that it helps more than it hurts.
We may begin by considering how reading in a group differs from reading alone. What differences does it make to a
reader to have twenty-five or thirty other readers around, all dealing with the same text? Perhaps the most significant
difference is the groups pressure on the individual student to respond to the text aloud. Reading without anyone else to
talk to, a student too easily puts a work aside without articulating her thoughts, and thus without fully digesting it.
Without the talking or the writing that might follow reading, the students reaction to the work remains undefined,
unspecified. George Henry describes the typical act of reading:
We read at our own pace, finish with an inchoate lump of meaning unformed by language, and then go on to
other reading or non-reading activity. Only when we try to communicate the ideas of the passage to ourselves
or to others or to relate it to another work or passage do we determine what meaning is really ours. . . .
In short, we must conceptualize itjoin it to something. That is, we must synthesize it, which always entails
bringing something of ourselves to it. The conclusion for teaching, it would seem, is that reading is inextricably
tied up with both oral and written composition, with experience, with other concepts inside us, and with other
reading.
1

The group, because it consists of others whose inchoate lumps are different from mine, compels me to define my own
more carefully, and thus see how I differ from those around me. Students who can be brought to sense their uniqueness
can be encouraged to take interest in and explore it further. It is the group that gives one the sense of uniqueness;
without others, the individual remains indistinguishable, an image without a contrasting background. The varying
perspectives that may emerge in discussing a literary work with a class fill in that background for the individual, helping
him to see more precisely where he himself stands; in other words, the group supplements his imagination by showing
him alternatives that he might not have envisioned as he read the work. Recognizing those alternative readings assists
and encourages him to clarify his own and thus to understand himself. Andequally importantthe discourse about
readings may enable him to come to understand his fellow students better.

129

This testing of oneself against others may occur infrequently. Students are likely to resist it. Followers are, after all, more
numerous than leaders; buying is easier than creating. Given the opportunity, students may simply accept, and even seek,
someone elses reading. Its much easier, after all, to wait until the class star has spoken and then say I think what she
said than it is to think something yourself. Teachers who try to encourage students to think independently, to reason
out their own understanding of a text, soon come to hear in their dreams the constant refrain But tell us what it means.
The students want something they can jot down in their notes, if they take notes, with assurance that these notes will
be both right and importantthat is to say, that theyll be on the test. The teacher, after all, is the one with answers
the answers that count, at least, on important things like tests. Raised on a diet of multiple-choice questions, students
come to view thinking as a process of choosing from among several statements, one of which is right and four of which
are wrong. If occasionally intellection is complicated by a choice that reads all (or none) of the above, they suspect that
someone has been careless or lazy, allowing ambiguity to creep in and muddy the processes of thought.
Such students, given the chance, will agree with the teachers reading. If you withhold your own interpretation, they will
fall back on the second line of defense and accept the reading offered by that student whom they know to be most often
right. Only when all else fails will they consider the desperate and frightening course of thinking for themselves. The
pain that labor inflicts is likely to discourage them from ever attempting it again.

Finding Responsibilities
The testing of self against others isnt natural or easy. Overcoming the inertia of the group and breaking down students
resistance to the work of thinking require some ingenuity on the part of the teacher. This problem is solved in part by
careful selection of works, an issue well discuss more fully in later chapters. If a work touches upon matters in which
students have a vital interest, and if the students can read it with enough ease to be able to grasp the fundamental issues,
then they may react strongly enough to the text to feel the need to speak. Yet its also surprising how often works that
seem to have little relevance to the students will nonetheless sustain a long and energetic discussion. The energy for
these discussions often seems to come not so much from the work itself as from the lucky appearance of a difference in
the readings of several students. It is as though the literary work has served as the catalyst for an examination of oneself
and ones friends in the classroom.
Those moments are hard to predict and harder still to arrange, but the teacher who seeks them can do several things to
increase their frequency. First of all, we can demonstrate that they are welcome, which we may do by inviting and
accepting personal response and by encouraging attention to the statements made by students in the class. Using them
simply as building blocks in an argument of our own, as steps to a predetermined reading to which we will lead the class
regardless of its inclinations, tells the class that their insights and questions are valuable only insofar as they contribute to
our labors. On the other hand, listening to them and dealing with them indicates that we consider them significant and
worth investigating.
In such an atmosphere students are more likely to make statements interesting enough to stimulate thought and
discusssion.

Response Statements
Further, you can find ways to put mild pressure on students to think and to formulate their reactions to what they have
read. For instance, you may deprive the students of the opportunity to seize upon someone elses reading by asking
them, immediately after they have finished reading a work, to take five or ten minutes to note their first responses to it.
Without dictating a form for the notes, suggest that they jot down questions, observations about the worth of the piece,
memories it calls to mind, speculations about the writer, or condemnation or approval of the ideas presented. Required
to verbalize in solitude, however briefly, students will be forced at least to begin to make sense of their impressions of
the text. No one else will have said anything with which they can simply agree; they will have to begin, by themselves,
the labor of conceptualizing. Having begun it, they may feel some commitment to develop or explore it, since it is their
own.
Thus those brief notes may yield the substance of the discussion. Depending on the group, you may want to allow
discussion to begin informally, when one of the short statements read aloud elicits a reaction from students, or you may
prefer to use the first several minutes of discussion to select from among the statements several that you can arrange as
an agenda for the session. You might ask for several students to volunteer to read or paraphrase their notes, jotting
down the essence on the board to serve as a rough agenda for subsequent talk, or else collect the papers from the class
and, looking through them, read out loud several that you think may be provocative, preserving the anonymity of the
writer if that seems desirable.

130

Another alternative is to collect the five-minute responses and sort them into groups. You might tell the class, I need
about five or ten minutes to arrange these responses according to the issues or ideas they address. Please just look over
the text again quietly so that I can do that (a slightly disguised request to re-read, pleading your necessity, not theirs).
Then sort them quickly so that you have groups of three to six, rearrange the students accordingly, and invite them to
talk about their various readings. Once, feeling either bold or lazy (or both), I called for their responses, telling them that
I was going to quickly sort them thematically. I took up the papers and then, poring intently over them as if studying
every nuance to be sure that my grouping was carefully done, I randomly divided them into five or six stacks. Then I
rearranged the class and asked each group to study the collection of responses theyd had to the text and try to figure out
what it was about their brief papers that had led me to put them together in a group. Several groups successfully
articulated some idea that bound them together; a few struggled fruitlessly to find a common thread. But the point, of
course, was simply to get them talking.
If youre discussing these free-writes with an active, alert, outspoken group, the students might be content to listen, as
the responses are read, for the ones that arouse their interest. On the other hand, if the students are too outspoken or
eager, then submitting them to the discipline of working by an agenda to ensure that all of the worthy statements are
considered may be more effective. A more reticent group, happy to let you read all the remarks without commenting at
all, may need more than a casual invitation to comment on whatever statement appears interesting. For that group, the
formality of an established agenda may be more productive.
The complexity of the work under consideration may also influence your choice of method. A work complex enough to
elicit a wide range of response, touching several different themes, might be better handled in the more orderly fashion,
again, to ensure that the various issues raised by the students are all given time. Regardless of the technique, you should
keep in mind that the brief writing period is intended to force the students into solitary, unassisted thought about the
work read and to obtain that thought from them so the group can discuss it. The justification for isolating them at first is
that the students responses will more likely be their own and that the collection of responses will be more varied and
wide-ranging. Thus we need to demonstrate our respect for that variety by refraining from criticism of the statements
and by managing the discussion with some discretion. If we too blatantly select statements we either like or disagree
with, or those of particular students, either good or bad, it will soon become clear to the students that we are not using
the statements to begin a discussion of their responses and concerns, but that the statements are simply the hooks upon
which we can hang our own views.
That is not to say that we should completely avoid guiding the discussion; the excesses of the overly indulgent teacher
who confuses freedom and anarchy do the student little good. There is nothing wrong, for instance, with suggesting that
the class pursue certain questions before it undertakes the discussion of others. For instance, a poem might elicit the
following two hypothetical responses from two students in the class:
I like the character in this poem. She seems to me to be a bit confused, but good-natured and kind.
This poem represents everything that is wrong with twentieth-century poetry.
Its the worst of Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan wrapped up in one.
The teacher would, of course, have to take the class into consideration, but if the class is typical, beginning discussion
with the first response rather than the second may yield more lively talk. The first response focuses on something fairly
specific the characterand comments on it in a personal, subjective manner. The remark could easily lead to further
talk about what the student, and other students, find appealing or unappealing in people, and to observations about the
specifics in the poem that develop an impression of the character. The second response, on the other hand, tends
toward the abstract, the formal, and the scholarly, and it makes broad statements that would be difficult for most high
school groups to handle very well. What, for instance, does the speaker mean by twentieth-century poetry? And to
what characteristics of Thomas and Dylan is she referring?
This second response, if dealt with early on, seems likely to impede the discussion. First, it will probably intimidate or
annoy those students who feel uncomfortable with the vast concepts to which the speaker has so casually referred. A
high school student who can easily sum up all twentieth-century poetry and test this particular poem against that
summation either has an imposing intellect or is a pompous fraud. Even if such a response does not antagonize the rest
of the class, it is likely to lead to vague talk that, by avoiding specifics, manages to sound impressive without saying much
at all. A discussion of twentieth-century poetry presumes knowledge of twentieth-century poetry, and most students
dont have the background to handle such a large and slippery concept.

131

The first response will draw more students into the conversation. It does not pretend to great scholarship, breadth of
reading, or depth of insight; it simply comments on the person created by the poem. More students are likely to feel
capable of discussing such a mundane, human issue. The talk is also more likely to lead to specifics:
Who is the character?
How is she represented to the reader?
What is the source of her confusion?
Why does she seem kind?
All of these questions direct attention to the poem, calling upon the students to refer to and draw inferences from the
text.
The first response may also lead to reflection upon ones own perceptions or values: What characteristics do you
consider desirable or attractive in people? What features do you share with the character in the poem? These reflections,
too, might lead back to the poem: Does this character actually have those virtues you have said are desirable, and if so,
how are they shown? Such discussion is concrete, being built on specific observations and inferences that can be traced
to the text. It demands actual thought, not simply manipulation of phrases likely to be encouraged by too hasty an effort
to discuss twentieth-century poetry.
After the concrete discussion the first response might promote, the class may be ready to deal with the more abstract
second response. Students may be reminded of other poems as they talk, and thus may recall specific examples of
twentieth century poetry to compare with the poem before them. By replacing the generalization with examples, they
can retain some of the concreteness of the earlier discussion. They may even arrive at a statement about twentieth-
century poetry in general. Questions may also arise about the characteristics of Dylan and Thomas, and samples of their
work may be presented for examination by the group. The second response is not, in other words, a useless statement to
be discreetly avoided by the teacher. But it is more difficult to deal with effectively and therefore not a good place to
begin. Start with the concrete and specific, and then move on.
After discussing the first statement about the poem, the class may sense the vagueness and ambiguity in its efforts to
deal with the second. They may see that the second response brings up issues they are not yet ready to handle
comfortably. That student who offered the second response may be gently led to qualify it. She may be compelled to
reflect on the possibility that the response was not really a response to the poem, but an effort to impress the teacher
and the class with insight and knowledge she did not possess. That, however, is a judgment for the student herself to
make. Although the teacher may suspect such a possibility, she should not voice her suspicions too openly for fear
students will hesitate to contribute in the future. The purpose of these response statements, after all, is to initiate
discussion. They are not to be treated as the products of thorough, painstaking thought, but as guesses or suggestions to
be explored. If the exploration leads nowhere, nothing is lost but a little time, and the class may turn its attention to
other possibilities, one of which may lead to insight.
On the other hand, our second student might really be on to something. She may not simply be trying to impress the
class and the teacher, and might be encouraged to find a poem by Thomas and a song by Dylan and show us just what
she means. How do these texts compare with one another? What are their similarities? How do they all represent
twentieth-century poetry?
The teacher may assist in finding the most productive route for the discussion to take, but should not deceive the
students about the nature of thought by suggesting that it is all orderly, cumulative, and successful. Students must learn,
largely by experience, that some beginnings are more likely to lead to productive discussions than others, and they must
also learn to tolerate uncertainties and failures. A lesson that moves logically, almost inexorably, from beginning to end
may give the teacher a satisfying sense of craftsmanship, but it does not accurately reflect the process of thinking any
more than a research report accurately reflects the process of scientific experimentation. The classroom should, as often
as possible, demonstrate the process of thinking as well as its results.

Patterns of Discussion
Brief responses, jotted down in the five or ten minutes after reading, may serve as the basis for a variety of patterns of
discussion. As we have noted, you may read them aloud, with pauses for discussion when one of them provokes a
reaction; you may call on volunteers to present their statements to the class; or you may list the statements on the board
and rearrange them into a formal agenda for the class session. There are other possibilities as well. For instance, the
teacher may wish to pair students initially, asking them to read one anothers statements and react to them. The pairing

132

for this activity could be purposeful; you might place together two students whose views are radically different, so that
under your watchful eye they could learn to listen more attentively and tactfully to opposing viewpoints. You might even
prescribe that students must first find something in their partners statement to agree with or commend, if only the
neatness of the handwriting, to begin the conversation on a more pleasant, less adversarial note.
After discussing in pairs, the class might combine pairs into groups of four, and perhaps later into still larger groups.
Discussion in these small groups will be easier for students to handle than discussion with the full class. The talk will be
less likely to jump from one issue to another, but may instead be progressive, allowing the students to build upon and
come to understand one anothers ideas. After the groups have reached a certain size, perhaps four or eight, the entire
class may come together again to hear the ideas the smaller groups developed.
Discussion first in pairs and then in slightly larger groups serves a purpose like that of the brief writing period following
the reading. It allows ideas to germinate and grow enough so that they cant be ignored. In the full class, the ideas of the
more vocal students are likely to command attention, whereas equally valuable ideas of more timid students may wither
away unnoticed. If, however, those fragile thoughts grow for a few minutes in the more comfortable setting of small
groups, they may root firmly enough that students will be willing to present them to the class. As the short writing
period discourages students from simply waiting for someone elses ideas about the reading, so the small group
discussion nurtures ideas until they can stand on their own before the full class.
The talk will wander far from the original statements, and when discussion has concluded, those first statements may
again become useful. You may ask the students to look at their first notes, reflect upon them, and again write briefly:
Have their original ideas changed?
Have they seen the poem from other perspectives?
Have their first responses been confirmed?
Has anything been revealed to them about their classmates or themselves?
The original statements may serve the students as a journal might, to remind them of how they felt and what they
thought. Reviewing those notes may help to show them what they have learned in the discussion. They may even grow
less eager for your explanations of works and less dependent on the narcotic of grades for their sense of
accomplishment.
These notes will also give you an excellent way to judge the effectiveness of discussion and the appropriateness of the
literature. If the notes show that the students have been thinking and listening to others respectfully but not
submissively, then they are likely to be enjoying the work. If the responses remain arid and detached, and if the notes
written after discussion indicate that little or nothing has happened, then you can reconsider the material or the way you
are managing the class.
One of our goals for the literature classroom is to invite students into the ongoing dialogue about significant issues that
is our culture. The guided discussions within the classroom should ultimately prepare them to take responsibility for
themselves in all of those discussions theyll later enter without the aid of a teacher. Thus its important to move them
toward independence, gradually backing away and allowing them to take more and more control of the discussion.
Consider the activity presented in Workshop #4.

DIALOG WITH A TEXT

Adapted from Response & Analysis
Teaching Literature in Secondary School by Robert E. Probst

Prepare a small booklet of prompts of questions (Ill suggest some below) that might guide the students through a
conversation about a text. Its easily done by duplicating each prompt in each quadrant of a page as follows:

133

This way, when the sheets are copied (roughly one set for every four students in the class) and collated into sets, they
can then be stapled and cut, each yielding four small booklets 5. 5 inches by 4. 25 inches.
A TEXT
Pass out whatever text you plan to use. A poem is suitable since you might be able to handle it satisfactorily within the
class period, but even a short story, provided students can read it quickly (or the night before), would also work.

If youre about to begin work on a longer work, perhaps a novel, then you might
select a passage that you find interesting or provocative. Then hand out the
booklets, requesting that students not read through their booklet in advance, but
rather take it page by page as discussion progresses. Tell them to read the text,
or read it aloud to them, and then ask them to begin working their way through
the booklet. Suggest that they spend a few minutes reflecting on the question or
prompt, jotting down notes about it in the booklet itself, and then share their
thoughts and talk as long as seems productive. If the discussion takes a path of
its own, urge them to follow it, even if it strays from the text or the question.
Tell them that when the talk seems to flag, they should agree as a group that
theyre ready to move on, and then turn to the next prompt, read it, again reflect
for a few moments, and then discuss. Let them continue for what seems to you
an appropriate period, and then pull the entire group back together to consider
the issues that have come up in the small groups.

Heres a set of prompts for you to use or consider (obviously they would have to be modified for students according to
their maturity):

Instructions
Please read the poem and take a moment or two to reflect on it. Then turn to the next page and begin. Take a
few minutesas much as you need or wantwith each question. Please reflect on each question for a moment
or two, perhaps jotting down brief notes, before discussing it. Some may be more productive than others for
you, and you may wish to give those more time. There is no rush, no need to finish them all. Please dont
glance ahead in the booklet.

Dialog
with a
Text

Dialog
with a
Text

Dialog
with a
Text

Dialog
with a
Text

134

Introduce yourself to your partner(s): Where are you from, what are your interests, and so on. Ask any
questions you wish.
What feeling or emotion did the text give you? Describe it briefly and explain why you think the text caused
that reaction.
What memory does the text call to mindof people, places, events, sights, smells, or even of something more
ambiguous, perhaps feelings or attitudes?
What did you see happening in the text? Paraphrase it, retelling the event briefly. When you discuss it, see if
there are differences in the paraphrasing among discussion partners.
Did the text give you any ideas or cause you to think about anything in particular? Explain briefly what
thoughts it led you to.
What is the most important word in the text? Explain briefly why you think the word youve picked is the most
important.
What is the most important phrase in the text? Explain briefly why you think its so important.
What image or picture did you see as you read the text? It might be something you remember and not
something in the text. Describe it briefly.
What sort of person do you imagine the author of this text to be?
How did your reading of the text differ from that of your discussion partner(s)? In what ways were they
similar?
How did your understanding of the text or your feelings about it change as you talked?
Does this text make you think of another text, song, TV show, or literary work? What is it and what connection
is there between the two pieces?
What did you observe or learn about your discussion partner(s) as your discussion has progressed?
If you were to write a few pages, maybe a letter, about your reading of the text, who would you write to and
what would you write about?

If youre trying this activity, take your time with it. The objective is not to finish first, to rush through the questions and
be done with them, but rather to start conversation and see where it takes you. Remember the movie and the
coffeehouse discussion afterwardyou arent hoping that the cab gets there before you finish your drink; youre hoping
the snowdrifts slow it down enough so that you can have one more and make this one other point you have to make or
ask this one other question you just have to ask. Students think of questions as tasks to be accomplished. They can get
through twenty discussion questions of the complexity of What is the meaning of life? in roughly five minutes. The
problem is to slow them down, to encourage them to explore, to relax, to investigate, to speculate, to consider and
reconsider, to tell stories, to ask more questions, to remember, to explain, to learn a bit more about the movie or the text
and the friends who spent the evening with them.
Focused Writing
You might also vary the pattern by placing constraints on the written responses. Ask students to respond to a certain
aspect of the work: the motivation of a character, the influence of the setting on the mood, the nature of the conflict
between two characters, the values implicit in the choices characters make, or the values and beliefs of the writer as
shown in the work. Or suggest that they respond from a particular perspective. If, for instance, you want students to
compare the works of two authors, one of whom the class has recently read, have them read the first work of the new
writer and respond as though they were the writer they have previously studied. Such an assignment is, of course, more
complicated and demanding, and you have to judge the group carefully before making it.
Further, keep in mind that any restriction on student response sacrifices something. The virtue of the free response is
that it identifies the students most vivid connection with the text. It may be a memory, an interpretation, an image, or
even a digression that seems entirely unrelated, but it is the immediate consequence of the encounter of reader and text,
and is thus material from which meaning might be made. Constraints on the response diminish the chances that it will
be so intimate a part of the reader. The constrained response is the result of the encounter of three forcesthe reader,
the text, and the assignment; that third variable will interfere with the interaction of the first two. Presumably,

135

compensation lies in stretching students to new perceptions they might have missed, or in increased efficiency in
teaching some element of literary art. We may decide that its worth the sacrifice, but we shouldnt let the assignment
dominate the literature itself. If students responses are too frequently or severely constrained, the students may come to
see the literature only as a basis for prescribed exercises and may find themselves taking the pseudo-professional
approach to their reading that Rosenblatt decried. The essential feature of response-based literature teaching is that it
makes every effort to ensure that students discover their own routes into the literature.

Longer Response Papers
Instruction may be further varied by expanding the brief writing period. Students may be asked to write a long response,
perhaps several pages, identifying and elaborating on their reactions to a work and tracing them as far back into their
own history and as deeply into the text as they can. A longer response statement is, of course, more than an effort to
identify starting points for discussion; it demands that students sustain their thinking alone, without the support and
questioning of other students or the teacher. In a sense, it asks them to discuss the work with themselves, to reduce the
dialog of the classroom to an internal monolog. More difficult than the ten-minute response, it nonetheless has the
virtue of allowing students the opportunity for uninterrupted reflection, at length, on their own perceptions. They need
not suspend their thoughts to consider those of their classmates, or compete for the time to voice opinions; they can
follow their own thoughts wherever they lead.
As is the case with shorter writing assignments, you may constrain long response papers in some way if it seems
desirable. In fact, constraint may be of more value to the students in longer papers than in the shorter response
statements since it helps sustain and focus their thoughts. Responses longer than a page or two, however, may be
difficult for students not yet used to the technique and aware of what to expect. The self-reliance demanded by a longer
paper will quickly drain those unpracticed in pursuing their own thoughts, so it may be wise to begin with very brief
writing assignments and only gradually ask for more extensive statements.
You can also assign response papers so that only limited direction is given. Richard Adler proposes a technique that he
calls answering the unanswered question. Observing that [f ]or too long we have tended to ask students questions,
bypassing their questions,Adler suggests inviting students to identify the unanswered questions in a work of literature
and propose answers to them. He points out:
As readers, all of us have found gaps in stories wherein we wish the author had supplied us with more
information. For example, if we read in a story that a character did something after discussing a situation with a
friend, we wonder what the dialogue between them might have included, or how the two persons conducted
that dialogue.
3

The student seeking the question or questions that remain, for her, unanswered,
or at least not explicitly answered, will look closely at the text and at herself. The assignment does not neglect the student
or declare her to be irrelevant, but forces her to ask herself,What is it that I do not understand in this work? The
question is general enough to allow the students individuality to surface, and yet may inspire a bit more confidence and
sense of direction than the instruction simply to respond.
Assignments like Adlers may help make longer response papers more palatable to the class. David Bleich, in Readings
and Feelings, offers several more strategies for eliciting responses from students. He proposes a sequence that begins
by asking for the most important word in the work, then the most important passage, and then the most important
feature, whatever it may turn out to be. 4 As one might predict, Bleich asserts that it is immediately clear that each
person has a different sense of what importance means.
5

Those different notions of importance indicate unique readings of the work. The statements made are often specific
enough to discuss intelligently, and the very presence of the word importance seems to compel people to offer
reasons. This word is the most important because. . . . What follows the because is the substance of the discussion.
You might plan one or more class sessions around Bleichs sequence. The discussion might, for instance, be divided into
three sections. First, you would ask students to read the work and answer the question What is the most important
word in the text and why? After giving them several minutes to reflect on the question and jot down brief notes, you
could call on several students for their comments, and use them to begin a discussion. If the resulting talk seems
energetic and productive, it can be pursued. It might be exhaustive enough that no further impetus is necessary. On the
other hand, if talk begins to fade, you may revive it by means of the next question, What is the most important passage
in the text, and why? Again, several minutes of reflection and writing might precede the discussion, which may in turn
be interrupted for the third question, asking for the most important feature of the work.

136

The technique, like Adlers, provides a task, thus giving direction and purpose to the students thinking, but the
questions are sufficiently open to allow students their own responses. The shifts in focus, although minor, may be
enough to refresh a discussion and reawaken the flow of ideas. The technique is a compromise between freedom and
control, directing the students but encouraging them to look inside themselves as well.
Like the brief written response, Bleichs teaching pattern may be varied in several ways. For instance, you might vary the
length of time for reflection. At one extreme, you may wish to raise the question as soon as reading is completed and
encourage the students to respond with their first thoughts. The spur-of-the-moment choice of most important word
might be different from the choices they would make if given a leisurely period for contemplation. That rash choice may
lead them to a surprising discovery. Or students may reject their choice after they have had several minutes to think, and
thus learn something about the difference between instinct and thought.
At the other extreme, you might ask students to prepare threeto five-page papers answering one of the three questions.
These longer papers, explaining the students choice of most important word, passage, or aspect, require the student to
look at both the text and himself and examine the transaction that has taken place between the two. The assignment
allows the student a fair amount of latitude. His choice may spring from his own concern with a particular issue,
conceivably one of minor importance to the author, or it may be an exercise in close textual analysis, an effort to identify
a key to the writers intentions. Ideally, a student will encounter a diverse enough collection of literary works during his
years in school that his papers will fall at both ends of the spectrum, some dominated by an interest in self-
understanding and some by a fascination for the workings of the writers mind. The virtue of teaching literature with
attention to student responses is that it allows this latitude; the challenge for the teacher lies in the difficult judgments
such teaching demands, for he must look for patterns in the students responses and encourage them to try new things,
not cling to one approach or the other.

Dealing with Longer Response Papers
Both the spontaneous, unconsidered choice and the fully developed paper can promote the exchange of ideas within the
classroom. Discussion after long written response, however, may be somewhat more difficult to manage than that
following brief periods of writing. Those hastier responses are fragments or kernels of thought, and are fairly easy to
handle. The longer statements, on the other hand, are likely to be not fragments of ideas but full logical chains. They are
more difficult to discuss because they are more complicated, because they are themselves works, or literary essays.
You might respond to them in several ways.
One way, of course, is to reply in private, either in conference or through notes returned with the papers. Both are time-
consuming. Notes, because they are easily ignored, are of questionable value, although they are traditional and students
may feel neglected if nothing is written on their papers. A brief note is probably a good idea, if only to reassure students
that their efforts have been given a serious reading.
Too often, however, students come to view papers as exercises in avoiding errors or predicting the teachers views,
perhaps as a result of too many futile lessons on grammar and usage or too many comprehension questions in basal
readers. When comments on papers consist of little more than approbation or correction, students come to see them not
as part of a dialog about their writing progress, but as a final, authoritative judgment of their work. This
misapprehension is reinforced by the absurdity of grading; if there is both a grade and a comment written on the paper,
most students will look first, and perhaps last, at the grade. And the comments, regardless of their content or motivation,
are likely to be taken as judgments or corrections.
Teachers who wish to participate with students in thinking about the literature may have to shake them loose from some
of their preconceptions about the teachers role, and that may be easier in short private conferences than in lengthy
notes on the students essays.

CONFERENCES Conferences allow the teacher to speculate with the student, and to make remarks that in
writing would require careful phrasing too time-consuming to undertake regularly. You might, for instance, think that a
students response is facile and evasive, skirting a difficult issue in the literature. To explain this might require a lengthy
analysis of the students paper, carefully worded to find the right tone. Such a comment might more easily be made
orally, where your tone and bearing can demonstrate that you hope to understand, not accuse, to help the student think,
not tell her what to think. In conference, you can observe the effect of your remarks on the student and can adjust and
correct.

137

In these conferences teachers might strive for several goals. The first is a sense of shared purpose with the student, as
people working together for a better understanding of the literature and of themselves. We should neither represent
ourselves
as absolute authority on the literature nor deny the sharpened insight that broader experience and fuller knowledge will
have given us. On the other hand, students too have a rich background of experience that provides the context for their
reading and shapes their response. In a conference, we have to demonstrate respect for both the perceptions of the
student and the words of the text. We must convey somehow that we are not the final authority, the one who decides
what the text means; meaning is created by the individual reader through the subtle process of reasoning about ones
own responses to the words. The conference is a cooperative venture in which student and teacher reason together. The
student contributes what he knows of himself and his responses, while the teacher contributes what she knows of the
work, the process of reading, and the student. Again, as with all aspects of instruction in literature, a delicate balance is
required.
A second goal for the conferences, and one that might be made explicit, is to model in miniature the kinds of exchanges
hoped for in the full class. First of all, the talk is cooperative rather than competitive; the point is to understand, not to
win arguments. Students should learn to suspend their own thoughts momentarily for the purpose of listening to
anothers. They should maintain respect for differing points of view, but also for reason, logic, and evidence. And they
should consider both the reader and the text. These criteria are more easily met in discussions with two or three than in a
group of thirty. If they can be modeled, even occasionally, in the smaller groups, then they are more likely to be met in
the large group.
A third goal is to evaluate the students work. The seriousness of the students efforts to understand the literature and
deal rationally with her responses to it may be more readily judged in a private conference than in the aftermath of full
class sessions. Furthermore, the student herself will be involved in the evaluation. She is, after all, the only one who can
know with any assurance whether she is thinking conscientiously about her reading. Others, including the teacher, are
too easily fooled. The final judgments upon her work are the students; if she is to continue to learn from her reading in
the years after school, she must begin to assume responsibility for those evaluations rather than leave them in the hands
of others. In private conferences the teacher may be frank, asking more penetrating questions, encouraging the student
to take responsibility for self-examination.

GROUP DISCUSSION Dealing with long written responses in groups and in the full class, although it will be made
easier by conferences, remains a difficult task. Patterns similar to those used with the very brief writing periods are
possible, but the work is complicated by the greater length of the papers. One alternative is to provide an outline for the
discussions, divide the class into the appropriate size groups, and ask them to follow it. For instance, students may be
paired and given a set of instructions like the following:
1. Read your partners paper, taking careful notes on:
any questions you have about his or her ideas
any points you think need to be explained more completely
any disagreement you have with his or her interpretation of the text
2. Discuss your notes with the author of the paper, encouraging him or her to elaborate and explain as much as he or
she wishes. Keep in mind that your purpose is to help your partner to think, not to change his or her mind.
If you disagree with points your partner has made, you might express those disagreements, but only to show her another
perspective or another reading, not to persuade your partner to accept it. After discussing one paper, reverse roles.
3. When you have discussed both papers, add a paragraph or two of postscript to your own paper in which you record
any additions, clarifications, or changes in your thinking that your conference has yielded.
Groups may need either more or less guidance than this brief outline provides. For example, they may need time limits
for each step. The purpose of the outline is simply to provide security and direction for students who may not feel
comfortable finding their own way through a discussion of one anothers papers. Ideally, the time will come when you
can discard such outlines and give students the freedom of the open request, Discuss each others papers. That time
may not come quickly, however, and shallow, perfunctory efforts to discuss one anothers works may be discouraging in
the meantime.

VARIATIONS Other patterns for discussing longer responses are worth experimenting with. For example, placing
students in groups of three, ask students to discuss the third students paper. While they talk, the writer should remain

138

silent, taking notes on the conversation. After a specified time, the writer should join the discussion to reply to points
the other students made and questions they raised. In larger groups of perhaps four or five, students might read the
papers written by group members; identify one major issue, question, or idea that the group seems either to share or to
disagree on; and then discuss that issue. The group might then summarize its discussion for the entire class so that the
class can discuss it.
Even if the students papers are not discussed directly, they can serve as a source of ideas for discussion. We can abstract
interesting issues from the papers; the students, having written them, are likely to have opinions about which issues they
want
to discuss. It is also possible for the papers to suggest by their neglect of an issue that it might be appropriate for the
discussion. For example, if all the students have commented on the events of a story but have failed to consider the
motivations of the characters, you may want to give time to that issue. That is not to say that the response statements
should be ignored, but neither should they be allowed to dictate the topics treated in the classroom. Having given
thought to the papers, the students may be expected to discuss more intelligently whatever arises in class, whether it is
drawn directly from those papers or not.
Of course, the teacher may devote class sessions to analyzing the students writing problems and accomplishments as
well as to exploring the literature. Our concern in this chapter is promoting interactions among students, so weve
concentrated on the usefulness of the response statements in stimulating thought and discussion, but they may also serve
in other ways. For instance, we might display them, if that seems a desirable way to reward performance or make the
students thoughts available to one another (and if, of course, the writers are willing). Or we might compile them into a
journal that we can distribute within the class, perhaps near the end of a unit, as a sampling of the students reflections
on the material. They might also serve as the basis for long papers of other kinds. If, for example, a students response to
a work speculates about the author, you might encourage the student to undertake a research paper on that writer. Or if
the response suggests other possible outcomes of a story or reminisces about characters the student has either
encountered or envisioned, you might be able to persuade the student to try writing fiction of her own.
If the student speculates about the intentions of the author, she might work on a critical essay, binding herself to careful
analysis of the text, and perhaps undertake the study of other critical statements about the work. Other possibilities will
suggest themselves as the work proceeds.
At the very least, response papers will serve as a source of some insight into the students themselves. That insight might
be the discouraging revelation that a student is barely comprehending, or that he is comprehending but remains
unmoved by the literature, but even that may help you to reconsider your selections, teaching, or both. At best, the
responses afford a privileged glance into the mind, allowing teachers to understand aspects of the students thought and
personality that might surface in no other way. Revealing or not, the response papers should indicate clearly to the
students that their feelings and thoughts are important in the classroom.
These papers provide teachers with an excellent opportunity to move the writing process all the way through to
publication. In recent English Methods classes, for instance, we invited responses to the Cisneros piece Eleven. The
class was asked to read and reflect briefly on the story, writing for about ten minutes to catch responses to the text, any
thoughts, memories, or emotions it awakens. They then divided into small groupsabout four in eachto discuss those
brief essays and the issues that came up. Predictably, since the story was about a classroom incident and these were
students working to become teachers, there were memories of classrooms, incidents in schools, former teachers, and the
like.
We then pulled the whole class back together to see what the various groups had discussed. We talked for awhile,
deciding that many of the responses had to do with memories of English classes. So I asked them to write again for
several minutes using the following assignment:
Recall an experience as a student in an English class, perhaps a very good or very bad lesson, or a particular teacher,
again perhaps exceptionally good or bad, or maybe an unusual collection of students in a class or group within the class.
Write briefly about itten or fifteen minutesa few paragraphs to capture the rough sketch of the person or the crude
outline of the event.
Again, when they finished writing we went into small groups to talk. I encouraged them to read aloud what they had
written, but didnt demand it, since these were obviously going to be very rough drafts and I didnt want to embarrass
anyone. Still, I wanted them to begin sharing responses and collaborating on their work, taking a few risks if they could
muster the courage.
After some time in groups we came back together as a full class once again to see what had transpired, and finally, I sent
them off with the assignment to expand their two short responsesthe first an unmediated reaction to Eleven and

139

the second their reflection on a memory of some previous English classinto something longer and more polished. The
specific assignment was the following:
Take your draft and spend some time expanding it into a longer piece, polishing and revising it in the light of both the
small-group and the full-group discussions. Make of this short essay whatever you want it to be. You might simply write
a story or an anecdote from the classroom; you may prefer to explicitly analyze the memory, pointing out the principles
of teaching that you think are revealed; or you may wish to write an essay on teaching practice. Do whatever you wish.
On subsequent days students reviewed the drafts with one another, helping to revise and polish them, and then put
them together in a small booklet, printing copies for each member of the class. The computer makes that easy, enabling
us to combine all the essays into one file, format everything consistently, print it out in booklet form, copy, and staple.
Within a week or so we were able to move from initial response to publication.
The purposes for this activity were, of course, specific to the English Methods class. I wanted the students to begin their
study of teaching with reflections on their own prior experiences, to see how individual responses to a work of
literature sometimes dramatically differentmight lead to coherent and interesting discussion, to see how literature
and composition instruction might be integrated, to show them that there might be some pleasure in publication, even
on the small scale of the classroom, and to begin to develop some sort of community within a group of students who
had come together for the first time. Your purposes will, of course, be different, but your design might be similar,
moving back and forth among reading, writing, and talking.

The Teachers Role: As Teacher and as Learner
It may seem that this emphasis on the responses of students, whether they are visceral and ill-considered or carefully
reasoned, diminishes the authority and stature of the teacher. In a sense it does, for by choosing to view reading as an act
of creation rather than a search for one true meaning, the teacher relinquishes the traditional authority of the pedagogue.
The abdication is not complete, however, for he has to assume a different responsibility: to counsel his students through
the difficult act of thinking. The attention to students first reactions is not meant to substitute for thought, but to
precede and prepare for it. As Bleich says,feeling precedes knowledge;
6
a student must desire to know before he will
undertake the labor that results in knowing. The literature teacher encourages students to feel and then to think about
what they feel in hopes that the thinking will then matter and the students will give more effort to it. If this succeeds,
and the students begin to discover that the literature does raise questions that matter to them, it might become easier to
encourage and demand careful thought.
In so doing, the teacher may find herself talking about her own responses, lecturing about the work or the writer, or
arguing with the students about their interpretations. But that isnt out of place in a style of teaching that emphasizes
student participation. If a class begins to work well, the students may accept the teacher as a participant in the same
processes of responding and thinking, able to contribute as another learner. The teacher who has achieved this stature
with her class may find that she slides easily back and forth between the roles of teacher and student.
At one moment she may be managing the class, assuming all the responsibility and authority that implies, and at another
moment she may be seated in discussion, joining the group as an equal, shown no more and no less deference than
anyone else.

Authority
A teacher who achieves that relationship with her students has a rare opportunity to influence their thinking. Having
abandoned the authority of powerthe threat of grades and testsshe may retain the authority of reason. Rather than
present the result of her thought, she joins in the process of thinking, giving the class the opportunity both to challenge
her and to observe her. In other words, the demand that the teacher respect student responses is not a demand that she
ignore her own. She should refrain from imposing her perceptions on the students, but if the class has matured enough
to accept her views without holding them sacred, it will be useful to present them. They may broaden the discussion,
showing the class how an older person, with more experience of the world and of books, reacts to the work. The
students should receive her opinions as they would receive those of a published criticnot as the final word, but as the
reflections of an experienced reader. In an untrained class that expects a great deal of telling and explaining, the teacher
must move cautiously, withholding her own thoughts to give the students room for theirs. But when the class comes to
understand the process of responding and building on responses, and sees that differences in readings are not only
expected but desired, we may state opinions with less fear that they will be taken as the final word.

140

In such circumstances, our responses and thoughts may even serve as models for the classnot because they are right
or correct or best, but because they may demonstrate interesting lines of inquiry that the class has not discovered for
itself.
In one class, for instance, many students had recently watched a film entitled Death Wish, the story of a man whose wife
and daughter are raped and beaten, one of them dying and the other left in a catatonic state, by housebreakers. The
courts fail to convict the killers, and the hero decides to seek justice by setting himself up as a potential victim for the
sort of spontaneous crime that took his family. Then, when assaulted, he summarily executes his attacker. He becomes a
vigilante wandering the streets, apparently vulnerable to anyone looking for an easy victim.
The students, almost without exception, heartily approved. They agreed that crimes against the defenseless were
inexcusable, that the courts and the police were inefficient, that punishment for violent crime was too mild, and that the
efficiency and finality of the heros method were laudable. He was, in their eyes, a modern day Robin Hood, a little
soiled by his surroundingshis city was grimier than Sherwood Forestand by the brutality of his method, but
nonetheless a hero, defending the weak against predators.
On the other hand, although I shared the students vicarious satisfaction with the rapid and well-deserved executions of
the criminals, I was not so pleased with the movie, and said so. I told the class I thought the film had exploited my
natural anger at stupid and violent crimes, moving me to applaud a form of justice I really didnt condone. Leaving
justice in the hands of either victims or vigilantes was likely to lead to some terrifying abuses. The hero had made no
mistakes, but would all who modeled themselves on him be so lucky? Might they not shoot someone running from the
scene of a crime and then discover that she was a frightened bystander rather than the criminal? Further, the crimes the
hero dealt with were all clear-cut cases of violent aggression, many of which could be stopped by violence. But if
vigilante justice were approved and accepted, it might be exercised in situations of less clear and obvious crime, perhaps
when someone felt deceived in a business arrangement that was not quite illegal but not completely upright. In short, I
worried about the film because it seemed to promote a dangerous conception of justice by playing upon natural feelings
of rage and impotence and using incidents carefully conceived to support its principles.
The discussion of the film was a digression from other class work, and I wasnt attempting to lead an analytical attack on
the movie. I was simply expressing an opinion, and intended to return quickly to the work at hand. The observations,
however, suggested a line of thought the students had not recognized. They had been caught up in the emotional
satisfaction of vicarious revenge, but a more complicated response to the film, one that involved reflecting on the
implications of its notion of justice, was also possible. The students accepted these thoughts not as the voice of
authority, but as an interesting alternative to their view. Some were annoyed, apparently because my reservations about
the film diminished the pleasure they could take from it, and some seemed almost chastened, perhaps by the discovery
that they had neglected to consider the implications of what they felt. In any event, my reflections seemed to contribute
to the students thinking about the film, even though I had presented them directly, perhaps even didactically, without
making any subtle effort to raise doubts or elicit further thought.
In other words, I wasnt trying to teach in the sense that teaching is leading students in their own thinking; nonetheless
the students seemed to be learning. I had for the moment been accepted as one of the class members; my opinions were
neither jotted down to be returned on the next test, nor disregarded as the irrelevancies of an academic. It was a lucky
happenstance, of course; both students and teacher had seen the same film and wanted to talk about it, interested in the
film and in each others responses. The incident may serve as a model of the sort of relationship between student and
teacher toward which the procedures outlined in this chapter strive. When such a relationship is achieved, when students
talk for the sake of the literature and themselves and not for the teacher or the grade, then the teacher may feel more
comfortable joining in the discussion.

Range of Response
I have suggested several techniques for encouraging students to respond and work with their responses. It might be
appropriate now to consider what kinds of responses the literature and discussions might provoke and how these will
influence the course of the conversation. The range of response is, of course, infinite; each reader is unique and will
react differently from day to day depending upon the circumstances. Still, the responses seem to fall into rough
categories, which are useful as a crude checklist for observing what takes place in the classroom and judging how best to
intervene.

PERSONAL Some responses are comments about oneself. They may express feelings produced by the
work read or describe incidents or individuals it called to mind. These responses may draw heavily upon the text, but

141

they are more likely to depart from it or abandon it completely, as the reader explores memories awakened by the work.
Although such responses may seem to offer little potential for teaching, the teacher might use them in several ways. You
might simply encourage the student to follow his own thoughts and see where they lead. If the reading has generated
enough enthusiasm and energy, this process may be very satisfying, even if it does not reflect the goals traditionally
associated with literature instruction.
If the student is unable to elaborate on his thoughts without assistance, the teacher might suggest exploring their
connection with the work. What, she may ask, are the similarities and differences between the incident you recall and
that presented in the story? Or, how does the person you remember differ from the character in the play who called her
to mind? Such questions provide the student with a small task that may help him to think further. The questions may be
appropriately dealt with either in class or in writing; in the classroom, however, the teacher must keep in mind her
obligation to the group. Other students may or may not be interested in the comparison between a story and the
memory it brings to one student. The teacher might remind the class that discussion will not do justice to all possible
issues and that they should make a note of questions that interest them so that they can either consider them in private,
use them as topics for future papers or journal entries, raise them again later in the class session, or talk them over in
private conference with the teacher or with friends. In class, it may often be necessary to move the discussion on to
other matters.
Personal responses are unquestionably desirable in the literature class, but the teacher might be alert for three possible
problems. One is the possibility that students will use personal digressions as a way of avoiding serious thought about
the work. Responding with opinions and feelings is not the sum total of reading. Students also need to learn to analyze,
to interpret, and to seek evidence for their conclusions.
The second possible problem is that the classroom may become for some students an orgy of self-expression and for
others an exercise in voyeurism. There are occasional students who cannot resist the temptation to bare their souls and
who are likely, when invited to respond to a literary work, to embarrass the class, the teacher, and perhaps themselves
with vehement outbursts or intimate revelations. The teacher needs to defend both the class and such students
themselves from that sort of behavior. That is perhaps best done by gently guiding the discussion into other paths or by
encouraging others to speak, but it may also be necessary to speak privately with a student who is too outspoken, both
to find out why and to recommend greater discretion or restraint in the future.
The third possible danger, the most subtle, is the tendency of personal comments to invite amateur psychoanalysis.
Neither the class nor the teacher is qualified to analyze a students psyche on the basis of her response to a literary work.
To do so is to become badly distracted from the task at hand, which is to deal with a literary work and the responses to
it. The students response may be examined and analyzed, but the student should not be, except insofar as she wishes to
do so herself.

TOPICAL Some responses are topical, focusing on the issue raised by the literary work. A book like Go
Ask Alice may encourage some students to talk about their own encounters with drugs or about friends who have run
into difficulties like those Alice faced, but it may also elicit more general discussion of the issue of drugs or of parent-
child relationships. Responses in which the issue is the most prominent concern may also digress widely from the text.
In the discussion of Go Ask Alice, some students may bring up the hypocrisy of a generation that can devote time at a
smoke-filled cocktail party to condemning marijuana, or they may lament the ineptness of the police and the courts in
enforcing the drug laws. They may, in other words, have a backlog of thought on the issue that they can call forth at will,
with little or no regard for the text.
The teachers charge in that case is to direct the energy of the students to the work at hand. If students are interested in
the issues raised by the text, they may be led to take an interest in the attitudes it expresses toward those issues. The
teacher might encourage them to compare their opinions with those offered by characters in the story or by the author.
When the responses focus on issues, the teacher is likely to have little problem getting the students to speak outthe
difficulty may instead lie in persuading them to pause long enough to hear what the writer has to say.

INTERPRETIVE The third form the response may take is interpretive, an effort to judge the significance of
the literary work. Here the reader focuses mainly on the text, intrigued by what it says and does. Thus students may
respond to Go Ask Alice by wondering,Is that really what it is like to be addicted to drugs and run away from home?
They may be reminded of no similar person or incident, and may not previously have considered the larger issue of the
availability of drugs, but the work may still capture them and make them want to understand it. Of course, students need
not be indifferent to the subject to want to interpret. Those with strong opinions may seek both the opportunity to

142

express them and the chance to hear someone elses views. They, too, may wish to understand, as accurately and
thoroughly as possible, what the writer has said. Many of those students who responded so strongly to Deathwish,
although they were at first satisfied with their vicarious revenge, quickly became interested in interpreting the movie, in
determining the implications of acting as the hero did and the significance of the narrow range of incidents the
screenwriter had selected for his story.
Skill in interpretation has been a prominent goal of most literature instruction, and although our concern with response
may reduce the emphasis on this skill, interpretation remains crucially important. The responses of the reader establish a
basis upon which interpretive statements may be made and judged. An interpretation is, after all, the statement of one
person, and thus, although bound to the text, it is still idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, students need to distinguish between
expressive and attributive statements, recognizing that a statement that attributes some characteristic to a character or a
text, or infers some belief on the part of a writer, requires us to offer some evidence for its validity. When we simply
express our feelings, we may assume that we are the authoritative voice on the subject, but an inference requires proof.
In an expressive statement, the student is restrained only by the demands of honestyhis feelings are his own and dont
need proof or defense. An attribution or inference, however, does require demonstration. Thus, when a student says,
The author means . . . , he obligates himself to a clause beginning with because and containing evidence for his
conclusion. Marshaling such evidence is an extremely important skill that deserves a significant place in the literature
classroom.

FORMAL A fourth possible topic for the response is form. Young children take great pleasure in the
repetition and rhythm of nursery rhymes and other childrens poems. They seem to feel no void when the meaning
remains obscure or simple, as it frequently is in childrens verse. Their pleasure derives from the formal elementsthe
sound, the rhythm, and perhaps the images evoked. Although adolescents seem less patient with works that lack a strong
narrative line, they too respond to formal elements, whether consciously or not, when they read. The reader who speaks
of the suspense in a mystery or the buildup of fear in a novel of the occult is noting effects created by careful
manipulations of form. Interested students should be encouraged to discuss those elements and even analyze them if the
question, How did the writer accomplish this effect? arises. Such analysis should not be overemphasized. If it is, the
students may see the text as something to work on rather than an experience to live through, and reading will no longer
be an aesthetic experience. Rosenblatt cautions against the tendency to: hurry the student away from any personal
aesthetic experience, in order to satisfy the efferent purposes of categorizing the genre, paraphrasing the objective
meaning or analyzing the techniques represented by the text.
7

Rushed into the scientists role, students are likely to bypass the literary experience:
The great problem, as I see it, in many school and college literature classrooms today is that the picturethe
aesthetic experience, the workis missing, yet students are being called upon to build an analytic or critical
frame for it.
8

So the talk about form should not be purely analytical. There are, of course, works that call conscious attention to their
form and almost demand that it be analyzed. Henry Reeds Naming of Parts (which well discuss later), with two
voices, the drill sergeants and the bored recruits, sliding back and forth into one another, seems to compel the reader to
look at technique. So does a work like Robert Cormiers I Am the Cheese (1977, Dell), a young adult novel sufficiently
complex and disturbing to capture the interest of the most sophisticated adult reader. Cormiers book tells about a
terrifying event in the words of a child whose mind has been disturbed by it. The story itself is intriguing, but more
intriguing is the authors skillful management of form. Readers will want to examine what he has revealed, what he has
concealed, and how he manages to do both. The analysis of form in such instances can be very productive and satisfying;
it comes as a natural part of the reading, answering questions that the reading inspires. But when it is imposed as an
exercise, rather than to answer questions raised by the text, it can supplant rather than support the aesthetic literary
experience.

BROADER LITERARY CONCERNS Finally, the reader may address broader literary concerns. These
include interest in biography, literary periods, the working habits of the writer, and the history of the times portrayed.
Mary Renaults novels may inspire an interest in early Greece and Rome, Poes short stories may stimulate curiosity
about his unhappy life, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail may lead some students to read Walden and perhaps Emersons
essays, the movie One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest may be compared with the book, and 2001 may arouse an interest
in computers and artificial intelligence. Such interests are to be encouraged; they are the lucky events of teaching. A

143

teacher with several good bibliographies (like Books for You and Your Readingsee the end of Chapter 5) or a helpful
librarian can entice a student into a great deal of independent and valuable reading when she discovers that a literary
work has awakened curiosity.

Using the Catalog of Responses
This list of responses, with its five crudely drawn and overlapping forms, has proved useful for some teachers in
observing class discussions. They have found it helpful to note, for instance, those classes in which one form of
response predominates. Some classes make little effort to do anything but interpret the works read. Raised on
comprehension and interpretation questions, they seem to have allowed their capacity for emotional response or
personal involvement to atrophy. In such cases the teacher may wish to encourage a more personal interchange with the
text using the techniques discussed in this chapter.
The list is more likely to be of help, however, in judging the performance of individual students. Students tend to stick
with the response modes they are used to, fearing to venture into new territory, and the teacher should adjust his
instruction accordingly, encouraging the patterns each student neglects. The range of responses is broad, and students
are better off learning a whole scale rather than restricting themselves to one note.

Variations
One problem that may have become apparent as this chapter progressed is that many of the techniques presented here
are demanding, both for teacher and students. Response papers demand concentration and careful reading, and
analyzing and discussing the responses may be even more rigorous. To teach in these patterns every day, five periods a
day, may well be too exhausting. Youll find that when things go well in the classroomwhen students do respond
enthusiastically to the text, and the discussion is active, with most participants enjoying it and learning from it the
lessons may generate energy rather than drain it. Nonetheless, there will be days when it seems desirable to plan
something simpler.
Strategies will suggest themselves in the course of other lessons. If, for instance, students develop an interest in the life
and times of the writer they are studying, a session or two on that topic would be appropriate. Ive discouraged
substituting such information for direct experience with the literary text, but if the direct experience sparks historical or
biographical interest, there is no reason not to satisfy it. The teacher might either lecture herself or ask students to
prepare lectures or short papers to deliver to the class. Both experiences can be valuable, retaining the focus on the
literature but providing some respite from the more severe demands of response-based discussion.
Class sessions devoted simply to quiet reading may also be beneficial. They are first of all pleasant, allowing students a
small island of solitude in the middle of a day filled with other voices. They may also be used, if further justification is
necessary, for private conferences, conducted quietly off to one side so as to distract as little as possible. The good
results of sustained-silent-reading programs, in which everyone in the school suspends other work for a certain time
each day to read, provide evidence for the virtues of this simple activity.
The strategies of creative drama might also be applied in literature teaching. It may take time for the class to grow
comfortable with pantomime, improvisation, and role-playing, depending on previous experience and how comfortable
the students are with one another, but once used to the techniques, students may find they provide insights into the
literature that are inaccessible through other approaches. Students regularly asked to read and analyze literature may
become cold-blooded in their judgments, showing no empathy for the characters portrayed. Acting out a scene from the
work may help these students sense the feelings of the characters more clearly than they otherwise would. For instance,
pairs of students might act out the confrontation between the old woman and the social worker in As Best She Could.
One student would imagine the thoughts and emotions of the old woman. She could be asked, in that role, to think
about such questions as:

How do you feel about asking for welfare?
What do you know about the welfare system?
Do the conditions of your life make you confident or pessimistic?
How do you feel about your daughters and about the social worker? The other student could imagine herself as
the social worker:
How many clients have you seen today? How have they treated you?
Are you well paid for what you do?
Are you compassionate and eager to help, or are you tired and bored?

144

How often have you been deceived by welfare clients?

Then the students could play out the scene.
After the improvisation they would be asked what they felt and thought as they acted out the scene. Many students
report feeling emotions they had not anticipated, or feeling expected emotions more strongly than they had anticipated.
The social worker, for instance, may report real anger toward the client. Simulating the experience produces some of the
emotions and insights the actual experience might have yielded, giving students a perspective they couldnt attain
through the more intellectual and distant process of analysis. It is one thing to say, Well, she might be angry at having
to deal with someone without the necessary forms who seems
to want all the rules bent just for her, and quite another to shout, I was furious!
Students may also find through improvisation that things need not have worked out as the author arranged them. The
student playing the old woman may grow so angry with the social worker that instead of walking away, she erupts in an
angry tirade. Or the social worker may sympathize with the old woman and decide to bend the rules for her. If
improvisations vary from the text, so much the better, for this demonstrates that the poem is the result of the authors
choices, and that other choices could have been made, revealing different values and ideas and resulting in different
poems. Just as varying response statements yield discussion by showing alternative readings of a poem, so might varying
improvisations reveal the alternatives from which the writer has selected.
The premise of the first chapter was that students should be encouraged to experience the literary work, allowing it to
stimulate images, feelings, associations, and thoughts, so that reading might be personally significant. The premise of this
chapter has been that discussion will yield insight into varied readings and perspectives, and will both deepen the
capacity to respond to literature and sharpen the powers of analysis. Toward that end, students should be encouraged to
speak with one another about their readings and analyze them together. Chapter 4 will introduce the third element
other textsand attempt to show how a collection of literary works can be compiled and taught so as to further
broaden response and sharpen analysis.

Endnotes

1. George Henry, Teaching Reading as Concept Development: Emphasis on Affective Thinking (Newark, DE:
International Reading Association, 1974), p. 17.
2. Robert E. Probst, Dialogue with a Text, The English Journal, Vol. 78, No. 1 (January, 1988), 3238.
3. Richard Adler, Answering the Unanswered Question, in Re-Vision: Classroom Practices inTeaching English, 1974
1975, Allen Berger and Blanche Hope Smith, Eds. (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974), pp. 74
75.
4. David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (Urbana, IL: National Council of
Teachers of English, 1975), p. 50.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid. , p. 3.
7. Louise M. Rosenblatt, What Facts Does This Poem Teach You? Language Arts, Vol. 57, No. 4 (April 1980), pp.
391392.
8. Ibid. , pp. 393394.

145

VIII. How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay
Reprinted with permission from Bucks County Community College

The purpose of a literary analysis essay is to carefully examine and sometimes evaluate a work of literature or an aspect
of a work of literature. As with any analysis, this requires you to break the subject down into its component parts.
Examining the different elements of a piece of literature is not an end in itself but rather processes to help you better
appreciates and understand a work of literature as a whole. For instance, an analysis of a poem might deal with the
different types of images in a poem or with the relationship between the form and content of the work. If you were to
analyze (discuss and explain) a play, you might analyze the relationship between a subplot and the main plot, or you
might analyze the character flaw of the tragic hero by tracing how it is revealed through the acts of the play. Analyzing a
short story might include identifying a particular theme (like the difficulty of making the transition from adolescence to
adulthood) and showing how the writer suggests that theme through the point of view from which the story is told; or
you might also explain how the main characters attitude toward women is revealed through his dialogue and/or actions.
REMEMBER: Writing is the sharpened, focused expression of thought and study. As you develop your writing skills,
you will also improve your perceptions and increase your critical abilities. Writing ultimately boils down to the
development of an idea. Your objective in writing a literary analysis essay is to convince the person reading your essay
that you have supported the idea you are developing. Unlike ordinary conversation and classroom discussion,
writing must stick with great determination to the specific point of development. This kind of writing demands
tight organization and control. Therefore, your essay must have a central idea (thesis), it must have several
paragraphs that grow systematically out of the central idea, and everything in it must be directly related to the
central idea and must contribute to the readers understanding of that central idea. These three principles are
listed again below: 1. Your essay must cover the topic you are writing about. 2. Your essay must have a central
idea (stated in your thesis) that governs its development. 3. Your essay must be organized so that every part
contributes something to the readers understanding of the central idea.
THE ELEMENTS OF A GOOD ESSAY
The Thesis Statement The thesis statement tells your reader what to expect: it is a restricted, precisely worded
declarative sentence that states the purpose of your essay -- the point you are trying to make. Without a carefully

146

conceived thesis, an essay has no chance of success. The following are thesis statements which would work for a
500-750 word literary analysis essay: Gwendolyn Brookss 1960 poem The Ballad of Rudolph Reed demonstrates how
the poet uses the conventional poetic form of the ballad to treat the unconventional poetic subject of racial intolerance.
The fate of the main characters in Antigone illustrates the danger of excessive pride. The imagery in Dylan Thomass
poem Fern Hill reveals the ambiguity of our relationship with nature.
PLEASE NOTE: THE BEST PLACE TO PUT YOUR THESIS STATEMENT IS AT THE END OF YOUR
INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH.
The Introduction The introduction to your literary analysis essay should try to arouse interest in your reader. To bring
immediate focus to your subject, you may want to use a quotation, a provocative question, a personal anecdote, a
startling statement, or a combination of these. You may also want to include background information relevant to your
thesis and necessary for the reader to understand the position you are taking. In addition, you need to include the
title of the work of literature and name of the author. The following are satisfactory introductory paragraphs which
include appropriate thesis statements: A. What would you expect to be the personality of a man who has his wife sent
away to a convent (or perhaps has had her murdered) because she took too much pleasure in the sunset and in a
compliment paid to her by another man? It is just such a man -- a Renaissance duke -- that Robert Browning portrays in
his poem My Last Duchess. Through what he says about himself, through his actions, and through his interpretation
of earlier incidents, the Duke reveals the arrogance, jealousy, and materialism that are his most conspicuous traits. B.
The first paragraph of Alberto Alvaro Rioss short story The Secret Lion presents a twelve-year-old boys view of
growing up -- everything changes. As the narrator tells us, when the magician pulls a tablecloth out from under a pile of
dishes, children are amazed at the stay-the-same part, while adults focus only on the tablecloth itself (42). Adults have
the benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct. When we grow up we gain
this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence and sense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for
growing up is a permanent sense of loss. This tradeoff is central to The Secret Lion. The key symbols in the story
reinforce its main theme: change is inevitable and always accompanied by a sense of loss. C. The setting of John
Updikes story A & P is crucial to our understanding of Sammys decision to quit his job. Even though Sammy knows
that his quitting will make life more difficult for him, he instinctively insists upon rejecting what the A & P represents in
the story. When he rings up a No Sale and saunter[s] out of the store, Sammy leaves behind not only a job but the

147

rigid state of mind associated with the A & P. Although Sammy is the central character in the story and we learn much
about him, Updike seems to invest as much effort in describing the setting as he does Sammy. The title, after all, is not
Youthful Rebellion or Sammy Quits but A & P. In fact, the setting is the antagonist of the story and plays a role
that is as important as Sammys.
The Body of the Essay and the Importance of Topic Sentences
The term regularly used for the development of the central idea of a literary analysis essay is the body. In this section
you present the paragraphs (at least 3 paragraphs for a 500-750 word essay) that support your thesis statement. Good
literary analysis essays contain an explanation of your ideas and evidence from the text (short story, poem, play) that
supports those ideas. Textual evidence consists of summary, paraphrase, specific details, and direct quotations.
Each of the paragraphs of your essay should contain a topic sentence (usually the first sentence of the paragraph)
which states one of the topics associated with your thesis, combined with some assertion about how the topic will
support the central idea. The purpose of the topic sentence is twofold: To tie the details of the paragraph to your thesis
statement. To tie the details of the paragraph together. The substance of each of your developmental paragraphs (the
body of your essay) will be the explanations, summaries, paraphrases, specific details, and direct quotations you need to
support and develop the more general statement you have made in your topic sentence. The following is the first
developmental paragraph after one of the introductory paragraphs (C) above:
TOPIC SENTENCE EXPLANATIONS AND TEXTUAL EVIDENCE
Sammy's descriptions of the A & P present a setting that is ugly, monotonous, and rigidly regulated. We can identify with
the uniformity Sammy describes because we have all been in chain stores. The fluorescent light is as blandly cool as the
"checkerboard green-and-cream rubber tile floor" (486). The "usual traffic in the store moves in one direction (except
for the swim suited girls, who move against it), and everything is neatly organized and categorized in tidy aisles. The
dehumanizing routine of this environment is suggested by Sammy's offhand references to the typical shoppers as
"sheep," "house slaves," and "pigs." These regular customers seem to walk through the store in a stupor; as Sammy tells
us, not even dynamite could move them out of their routine (485). This paragraph is a strong one because it is
developed through the use of quotations, summary, details, and explanation to support the topic sentence. Notice how
it relates back to the thesis statement. The Conclusion Your literary analysis essay should have a concluding
paragraph that gives your essay a sense of completeness and lets your readers know that they have come to the end of

148

your paper. Your concluding paragraph might restate the thesis in different words, summarize the main points you have
made, or make a relevant comment about the literary work you are analyzing, but from a different perspective. Do not
introduce a new topic in your conclusion. Below is the concluding paragraph from the essay already quoted above
(A) about Browning's poem "My Last Duchess": If the Duke has any redeeming qualities, they fail to appear in the
poem. Browning's emphasis on the Duke's traits of arrogance, jealousy, and materialism make it apparent that anyone
who might have known the Duke personally would have based his opinion of him on these three personality "flaws."
Ultimately, our opinion of the Duke is not a favorable one, and it is clear that Browning meant us to feel this way. The
Title of Your Essay It is essential that you give your essay a title which is descriptive of the approach you are taking in
your paper. Just as you did in your introductory paragraph, try to get the reader's attention. Using only the title of the
literary work you are examining is unsatisfactory. The titles that follow are appropriate for the papers (A, B, C)
discussed above: Robert Browning's Duke: So What's to Like? The A & P as a State of Mind "The Secret Lion": It's
Hard to Grow Up Audience Consider the reader for whom you are writing your essay. Imagine you are writing for
other students in your class who have about as much education as you do. They have read the assigned work just as you
have, but perhaps they have not thought about it in exactly the same way as you. In other words, it is not necessary to
"retell" the work of literature in any way. Rather it is your role to be the explainer or interpreter of the work -- to tell
what certain elements of the work mean in relation to your central idea (thesis). When you make references to the text
of the short story, poem, or play, you are doing so in order to remind your audience of something they already know.
The principle emphasis of your essay is to draw conclusions and develop arguments.
USING TEXTUAL EVIDENCE
The skillful use of textual evidence -- summary, paraphrase, specific detail, and direct quotations -- can illustrate
and support the ideas you are developing in your essay. However, textual evidence should be used judiciously and only
when it directly relates to your topic. The correct and effective use of textual evidence is vital to the successful literary
analysis essay. Summary If a key event or series of events in the literary work support a point you are trying to make,
you may want to include a brief summary, making sure that you show the relevance of the event or events by explicitly
connecting your summary to your point. Below is an effective summary (with its relevance clearly pointed out) from the
essay already quoted above on "The Secret Lion" (B): The boys find the grinding ball, but later attempt to bury it
(SUMMARY). Burying it is their futile attempt to make time stand still and to preserve perfection

149

( RELEVANCE). Paraphrase You can make use of paraphrase when you need the details of the original, but not
necessarily the words of the original: paraphrase to put someone else's words into your own words. Below is an example
(also from the paper on "The Secret Lion") of how to "translate" original material into part of your own paper:
Original: "I was twelve and in junior high school and something happened that we didn't have a name for, but it was
nonetheless like a lion, and roaring, roaring that way the biggest things do." Paraphrase: Early in the story, the narrator
tells us that when he turned twelve and started junior high school, life changed in a significant way that he and his
friends couldn't quite find a name for. Specific Detail Various types of details from the text lend concrete support to
the development of the central idea of your literary analysis essay. These details add credibility to the point you are
developing. Below is a list of some of the details which could have been used in the developmental paragraph from the
paper on John Updike's short story "A & P" (see the paragraph again for which details were used and how they
were used). "usual traffic" "fluorescent lights" "checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor" "electric eye"
shoppers like "sheep," "houseslaves," and "pigs" neatly stacked food dynamite Using Direct Quotations
Quotations can illuminate and support the ideas you are trying to develop. A judicious use of quoted material will make
your points clearer and more convincing. As with all the textual evidence you use, make sure you explain how the
evidence is relevant -- let the reader know what you make of the quotations you cite. Below are guidelines and
examples that should help you use quotations effectively: 1. Brief quotations (four lines or fewer of prose and three lines
or fewer of poetry) should be carefully introduced and integrated into the text of your paper. Put quotation marks
around all briefly quoted material. Prose example: As the "manager" of the A & P, Lengel is both the guardian and
enforcer of "policy." When he gives the girls "that sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare," we know we are in the
presence of the A & P's version of a dreary bureaucrat who "doesn't miss much" (487). Make sure you give page
numbers when necessary. Notice that in this example the page numbers are in parenthesis after the quotation
marks but before the period. Poetry example: From the beginning, the Duke in Browning's poem gives the reader a
sense of how possessive he really is: "That's my last Duchess on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive" (1-2). We can't
help notice how, even though the Duke is talking about her portrait, his main concern is that she belongs to him.
Notice that line # 1 is separated from line # 2 by a slash. Make sure you give the line numbers when necessary.
2. Lengthy quotations should be separated from the text of your paper. More than four lines of prose should be double
spaced and indented ten spaces from the left margin, with the right margin the same as the rest of your paper. More

150

than three lines of poetry should be double spaced and centered on the page. Note: do not use quotation marks to
set off these longer passages because the indentation itself indicates that the material is quoted. Prose
example: The first paragraph of "The Secret Lion" introduces the narrator as someone who has just entered
adolescence and isn't quite sure what to make of it: I was twelve and in junior high school and something happened that
we didn't have a name for, but it was there nonetheless like a lion, and roaring, roaring that way the biggest things do.
Everything changed. Just that. Like the rug, the one that gets pulled -- or better, like the tablecloth those magicians pull
where the stuff on the table stays the same but the gasp! from the audience makes the staying-the-same part not matter.
Like that. (41-42) Make sure you give page numbers when necessary. Notice in this example that the page
numbers are in parenthesis after the period of the last sentence. Poetry example: The Duke seems to object to
the fact that his "last Duchess" is not discriminating enough about bestowing her affection. In the following lines from
the middle of the poem, the Duke lists examples of this "fault": Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast, The drooping
of the daylight in the west, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She
rode with round the terrace -- all and each Would draw from her alike the approving speech. (25-30) Make sure you
give line numbers when necessary. 3. If any words are added to a quotation in order to explain who or what the
quotation refers to, you must use brackets to distinguish your addition from the original source. Example: The literary
critic John Strauss asserts that "he [Young Goodman Brown] is portrayed as self-righteous and disillusioned." Brackets
are used here because there is no way of knowing who "he" is unless you add that information. Brackets are
also used to change the grammatical structure of a quotation so that it fits into your sentence. Example: Strauss also
argues that Hawthorne "present[s] Young Goodman Brown in an ambivalent light." Brackets are used here to add the
"s" to the verb "present" because otherwise the sentence would not be grammatically correct. 4. You must use
ellipsis if you omit any words from the original source you are quoting. Ellipsis can be used at the beginning, in the
middle, or at the end of the quotation, depending on where the missing words were originally. Ellipsis is formed by
either three or four periods with a space between each period. Original: "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man
healthy, wealthy and wise." Example (omission from beginning): This behavior ". . . makes a man healthy, wealthy,
and wise." Ellipsis formed by three dots after the quotation marks. Example (omission from middle): This
maxim claims that "Early to bed . . . makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Ellipsis formed by three dots used in
place of the words "and early to rise." Example (omission from end): He said, "Early to bed and early to rise

151

makes a man healthy . . . ." Ellipsis is formed by four dots before the quotation marks -- the fourth dot is really a
period which ends the sentence. 5. Use a single line of spaced periods to indicate the omission of an entire line of
poetry. Example: The Duke seems to object to the fact that his "last Duchess" is not discriminating enough about
bestowing her affection: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The drooping of the daylight in the West, The bough of
cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, while the white mule She rode around the terrace -- like and
each Would draw from her alike the approving speech. (26-30) Punctuating Direct Quotations You will be able to
punctuate quoted materials accurately if you observe the following conventions used in writing about literature: 1. When
the quoted material is part of your own sentence, place periods and commas inside the quotation marks. Example:
The narrator of "The Secret Lion" says that the change was "like a lion." The period is inside the quotation marks. 2.
When the quoted material is part of your own sentence, but you need to include a parenthetical reference to page or line
numbers, place the periods and commas after the reference. Example: The narrator of "The Secret Lion" says that
the change was "like a lion" (41). The period is outside the quotation marks, after the parenthetical reference. 3.
When the quoted material is part of your own sentence, punctuation marks other than periods and commas, such as
question marks, are placed outside the quotation marks, unless they are part of the quoted material. Example (not part
of original): Why does the narrator of "The Secret Lion" say that the change was "like a lion"? The question mark is
placed after the quotation marks because it does not appear in the original -- it ends a question being asked
about the story. Example (part of original): The Duke shows his indignation that the Duchess could like everyone
and everything when he says, "Sir, 'twas all one!" The exclamation point is placed inside the quotation marks
because it appears in the original. 4. When the original material you are quoting already has quotations marks (for
instance, dialog from a short story), you must use single quotation marks within the double quotation marks. Example:
Lengel tries to stop Sammy from quitting by saying, " 'Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad'. "

THREE CONVENTIONS TO REMEMBER WHEN WRITING A LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY
1. You must give a clear, full reference to the work and author you are writing about somewhere in your introductory
paragraph (see the example introductory paragraphs A, B, and C above).
2. Use the correct format for referring to the work you are discussing. The titles of short stories, poems, and essays
should be placed in quotation marks; the titles of novels, plays, films, and TV shows should be either underlined or

152

italicized: "My Last Duchess" (poem) Antigone (play) "The Secret Lion" (short story) Forest Gump (movie)
Pride and Prejudice (novel) Roseanne (TV show)
3. Use the present tense when you are discussing and writing about literature -- literary works are considered to exist in
the present (see all the example paragraphs throughout).

153

CHECKLIST

1. Is the topic you have chosen to write about manageable for the length of the paper you are writing? Is it too narrow
or too broad?
2. Is your title engaging? Does it suggest the approach you are taking in your paper?
3. Does your first paragraph introduce your topic, name the writer and the work, and end with your thesis statement?
Will it get the reader's attention?
4. Is your thesis clear? Does it state the central idea of your paper?
5. Is your paper organized in a way that your reader will be able to follow?
6. Are your developmental paragraphs unified (everything in the paragraph relates to the topic
of the paragraph) and coherent (everything in the paragraph is arranged in a logical order)?
7. Have you used transitional words where necessary within each paragraph? Are there transitions linking all the
paragraphs of your essay?
8. Does your concluding paragraph provide a sense of closure?
9. Have you used technical terms correctly?
10. Have you used brief summary, paraphrase, specific details, and direct quotations? Have you explained why you are
using them and how they support your central idea?
11. If you have used information from sources outside the actual work of literature (for example,
books of criticism), have you documented this information properly? To provide documentation for literary papers, you
need to use MLA documentation style, which can found in most English handbooks and in books on how to
write research papers.
12. Have you proofread your final draft?

154

155

Writing About Literature (Fiction)
What this handout is about
This handout describes some steps for planning and writing papers about fiction texts. For information on writing about
other kinds of literature, please see the Writing Center's handouts on writing about drama and poetry explications.
Demystifying the process
Writing an analysis of a piece of fiction can be a mystifying process. First, literary analyses (or papers that offer an
interpretation of a story) rely on the assumption that stories must mean something. How does a story mean something?
Isnt a story just an arrangement of characters and events? And if the author wanted to convey a meaning, wouldnt he
or she be much better off writing an essay just telling us what he or she meant?
Its pretty easy to see how at least some stories convey clear meanings or morals. Just think about a parable like the
prodigal son or a nursery tale about "crying wolf." Stories like these are reduced down to the bare elements, giving us
just enough detail to lead us to their main points, and because they are relatively easy to understand and tend to stick in
our memories, theyre often used in some kinds of education.
But if the meanings were always as clear as they are in parables, who would really need to write a paper analyzing them?
Interpretations of fiction would not be interesting if the meanings of the stories were clear to everyone who reads them.
Thankfully (or perhaps regrettably, depending on your perspective) the stories were asked to interpret in our classes are
a good bit more complicated than most parables. They use characters, settings, and actions to illustrate issues that have
no easy resolution. They show different sides of a problem, and they can raise new questions. In short, the stories we
read in class have meanings that are arguable and complicated, and its our job to sort them out.
It might seem that the stories do have specific meanings, and the instructor has already decided what those meanings
are. Not true. Instructors can be pretty dazzling (or mystifying) with their interpretations, but thats because they have a
lot of practice with stories and have developed a sense of the kinds of things to look for. Even so, the most well-
informed professor rarely arrives at conclusions that someone else wouldnt disagree with. In fact, most professors are
aware that their interpretations are debatable and actually love a good argument. But lets not go to the other extreme.
To say that there is no one answer is not to say that anything we decide to say about a novel or short story is valid,
interesting, or valuable. Interpretations of fiction are often opinions, but not all opinions are equal.
So what makes a valid and interesting opinion? A good interpretation of fiction will:
avoid the obvious (in other words, it wont argue a conclusion that most readers could reach on their own from
a general knowledge of the story)
support its main points with strong evidence from the story
use careful reasoning to explain how that evidence relates to the main points of the interpretation.
The following steps are intended as a guide through the difficult process of writing an interpretive paper that meets these
criteria. Writing tends to be a highly individual task, so adapt these suggestions to fit your own habits and inclinations.
Writing a paper on fiction in 9 steps

156

1. Become familiar with the text.
Theres no substitute for a good general knowledge of your story. A good paper inevitably begins with the writer having
a solid understanding of the work that he or she interprets. Being able to have the whole book, short story, or play in
your headat least in a general waywhen you begin thinking through ideas will be a great help and will actually allow
you to write the paper more quickly in the long run. It's even a good idea to spend some time just thinking about the
story. Flip back through the book and consider what interests you about this piece of writingwhat seemed strange,
new, or important?
2. Explore potential topics
Perhaps your instructor has given you a list of topics to choose, or perhaps you have been asked to create your own.
Either way, you'll need to generate ideas to use in the papereven with an assigned topic, you'll have to develop your
own interpretation. Let's assume for now that you are choosing your own topic.
After reading your story, a topic may just jump out at you, or you may have recognized a pattern or identified a problem
that youd like to think about in more detail. What is a pattern or a problem?
A pattern can be the recurrence of certain kinds of imagery or events. Usually, repetition of particular aspects of a story
(similar events in the plot, similar descriptions, even repetition of particular words) tends to render those elements more
conspicuous. Lets say Im writing a paper on Mary Shelleys novel Frankenstein. In the course of reading that book, I
keep noticing the authors use of biblical imagery: Victor Frankenstein anticipates that "a new species would bless me as
its creator and source" (52) while the monster is not sure whether to consider himself as an Adam or a Satan. These
details might help me interpret the way characters think about themselves and about each other, as well as allow me to
infer what the author might have wanted her reader to think by using the Bible as a frame of reference. On another
subject, I also notice that the book repeatedly refers to types of education. The story mentions refers to books that its
characters read and the different contexts in which learning takes place.
A problem, on the other hand, is something in the story that bugs you or that doesnt seem to add up. A character
might act in some way thats unaccountable, a narrator may leave out what we think is important information (or may
focus on something that seems trivial), or a narrator or character may offer an explanation that doesnt seem to make
sense to us. Not all problems lead in interesting directions, but some definitely do and even seem to be important parts
of the story. In Frankenstein, Victor works day and night to achieve his goal of bringing life to the dead, but once he
realizes his goal, he is immediately repulsed by his creation and runs away. Why? Is there something wrong with his
creation, something wrong with his goal in the first place, or something wrong with Victor himself? The book doesnt
give us a clear answer but seems to invite us to interpret this problem.
If nothing immediately strikes you as interesting or no patterns or problems jump out at you, dont worry. Just start
making a list of whatever you remember from your reading, regardless of how insignificant it may seem to you now.
Consider a characters peculiar behavior or comments, the unusual way the narrator describes an event, or the authors
placement of an action in an odd context. (Step 5 will cover some further elements of fiction that you might find useful
at this stage as well.)
Theres a good chance that some of these intriguing moments and oddities will relate to other points in the story,
eventually revealing some kind of pattern and giving you potential topics for your paper. Also keep in mind that if you
found something peculiar in the story youre writing about, chances are good that other people will have been perplexed
by these moments in the story as well and will be interested to see how you make sense of it all. It's even a good idea to
test your ideas out on a friend, a classmate, or an instructor since talking about your ideas will help you develop them
and push them beyond obvious interpretations of the story. And it's only by pushing those ideas that you can write a paper that
raises interesting issues or problems and that offers creative interpretations related to those issues.

157

3. Select a topic with a lot of evidence
If youre selecting from a number of possible topics, narrow down your list by identifying how much evidence or how
many specific details you could use to investigate each potential issue. Do this step just off the top of your head. Keep in
mind that persuasive papers rely on ample evidence and that having a lot of details to choose from can also make your
paper easier to write.
It might be helpful at this point to jot down all the events or elements of the story that have some bearing on the two or
three topics that seem most promising. This can give you a more visual sense of how much evidence you will have to
work with on each potential topic. Its during this activity that having a good knowledge of your story will come in
handy and save you a lot of time. Dont launch into a topic without considering all the options first because you may end
up with a topic that seemed promising initially but that only leads to a dead end.
4. Write out a working thesis
Based on the evidence that relates to your topicand what you anticipate you might say about those pieces of
evidencecome up with a working thesis. Dont spend a lot of time composing this statement at this stage since it will
probably change (and a changing thesis statement is a good sign that youre starting to say more interesting and complex
things on your subject). At this point in my Frankenstein project, Ive become interested in ideas on education that seem
to appear pretty regularly, and I have a general sense that aspects of Victors education lead to tragedy. Without
considering things too deeply, Ill just write something like "Victor Frankensteins tragic ambition was fueled by a faulty
education."
5. Make an extended list of evidence
Once you have a working topic in mind, skim back over the story and make a more comprehensive list of the details that
relate to your point. For my paper about education in Frankenstein, Ill want to take notes on what Victor Frankenstein
reads at home, where he goes to school and why, what he studies at school, what others think about those studies, etc.
And even though Im primarily interested in Victors education, at this stage in the writing, Im also interested in
moments of education in the novel that dont directly involve this character. These other examples might provide a
context or some useful contrasts that could illuminate my evidence relating to Victor. With this goal in mind, Ill also
take notes on how the monster educates himself, what he reads, and what he learns from those he watches. As you make
your notes keep track of page numbers so you can quickly find the passages in your book again and so you can easily
document quoted passages when you write without having to fish back through the book.
At this point, you want to include anything, anything, that might be useful, and you also want to avoid the temptation to
arrive at definite conclusions about your topic. Remember that one of the qualities that makes for a good interpretation
is that it avoids the obvious. You want to develop complex ideas, and the best way to do that is to keep your ideas
flexible until youve considered the evidence carefully. A good gauge of complexity is whether you feel you understand
more about your topic than you did when you began (and even just reaching a higher state of confusion is a good
indicator that youre treating your topic in a complex way).
When you jot down ideas, you can focus on the observations from the narrator or things that certain characters say or
do. These elements are certainly important. It might help you come up with more evidence if you also take into account
some of the broader components that go into making fiction, things like plot, point of view, character, setting, and
symbols.
Plot is the string of events that go into the narrative. Think of this as the "who did what to whom" part of the
story. Plots can be significant in themselves since chances are pretty good that some action in the story will
relate to your main idea. For my paper on education in Frankenstein, Im interested in Victors going to the
University of Ingolstadt to realize his fathers wish that Victor attend school where he could learn about a

158

another culture. Plots can also allow you to make connections between the story youre interpreting and some
other stories, and those connections might be useful in your interpretation. For example, the plot of
Frankenstein, which involves a man who desires to bring life to the dead and creates a monster in the process,
bears some similarity to the ancient Greek story of Icarus who flew too close to the sun on his wax wings. Both
tell the story of a character who reaches too ambitiously after knowledge and suffers dire consequences.
Your plot could also have similarities to whole groups of other stories, all having conventional or easily
recognizable plots. These types of stories are often called genres. Some popular genres include the gothic, the
romance, the detective story, the bildungsroman (this is just a German term for a novel that is centered around
the development of its main characters), and the novel of manners (a novel that focuses on the behavior and
foibles of a particular class or social group). These categories are often helpful in characterizing a piece of
writing, but this approach has its limitations. Many novels dont fit nicely into one genre, and others seem to
borrow a bit from a variety of different categories. For example, given my working thesis on education, I am
more interested in Victor's development than in relating Frankenstein to the gothic genre, so I might decide to
treat the novel as a bildungsroman.
And just to complicate matters that much more, genre can sometimes take into account not only the type of
plot but the form the novelist uses to convey that plot. A story might be told in a series of letters (this is called
an epistolary form), in a sequence of journal entries, or in a combination of forms (Frankenstein is actually told
as a journal included within a letter).
These matters of form also introduce questions of point of view, that is, who is telling the story and what do
they or dont they know. Is the tale told by an omniscient or all-knowing narrator who doesnt interact in the
events, or is it presented by one of the characters within the story? Can the reader trust that person to give an
objective account, or does that narrator color the story with his or her own biases and interests?
Character refers to the qualities assigned to the individual figures in the plot. Consider why the author assigns
certain qualities to a character or characters and how any such qualities might relate to your topic. For example,
a discussion of Victor Frankensteins education might take into account aspects of his character that appear to
be developed (or underdeveloped) by the particular kind of education he undertakes. Victor tends to be
ambitious, even compulsive about his studies, and I might be able to argue that his tendency to be extravagant
leads him to devote his own education to writers who asserted grand, if questionable, conclusions.
Setting is the environment in which all of the actions take place. What is the time period, the location, the time
of day, the season, the weather, the type of room or building? What is the general mood, and who is present?
All of these elements can reflect on the storys events, and though the setting of a story tends to be less
conspicuous than plot and character, setting still colors everything thats said and done within its context. If
Victor Frankenstein does all of his experiments in "a solitary chamber, or rather a cell, at the top of the house,
and separated from all the other apartments by a staircase" (53) we might conclude that there is something anti-
social, isolated, and stale, maybe even unnatural about his project and his way of learning.
Obviously, if you consider all of these elements, youll probably have too much evidence to fit effectively into one paper.
Your goal is merely to consider each of these aspects of fiction and include only those that are most relevant to your
topic and most interesting to your reader. A good interpretive paper does not need to cover all elements of the story
plot, genre, narrative form, character, and setting. In fact, a paper that did try to say something about all of these
elements would be unfocused. You might find that most of your topic could be supported by a consideration of
character alone. Thats fine. For my Frankenstein paper, Im finding that my evidence largely has to do with the setting,
evidence that could lead to some interesting conclusions that my reader probably hasnt recognized on his or her own.
6. Select your evidence
Once youve made your expanded list of evidence, decide which supporting details are the strongest. First, select the
facts which bear the closest relation to your thesis statement. Second, choose the pieces of evidence youll be able to say
the most about. Readers tend to be more dazzled with your interpretations of evidence than with a lot of quotes from the book. It would

159

be useful to refer to Victor Frankensteins youthful reading in alchemy, but my reader will be more impressed by some
analysis of how the writings of the alchemistswho pursued magical principles of chemistry and physicsreflect the
ambition of his own goals. Select the details that will allow you to show off your own reasoning skills and allow you to
help the reader see the story in a way he or she may not have seen it before.
7. Refine your thesis
Now it's time to go back to your working thesis and refine it so that it reflects your new understanding of your topic.
This step and the previous step (selecting evidence) are actually best done at the same time, since selecting your evidence
and defining the focus of your paper depend upon each other. Don't forget to consider the scope of your project: how
long is the paper supposed to be, and what can you reasonably cover in a paper of that length? In rethinking the issue of
education in Frankenstein, I realize that I can narrow my topic in a number of ways: I could focus on education and
culture (Victors education abroad), education in the sciences as opposed to the humanities (the monster reads Milton,
Goethe, and Plutarch), or differences in learning environments (e.g. independent study, university study, family reading).
Since I think I found some interesting evidence in the settings that I can interpret in a way that will get my readers
attention, Ill take this last option and refine my working thesis about Victors faulty education to something like this:
"Victor Frankensteins education in unnaturally isolated environments fosters his tragic ambition."
8. Organize your evidence
Once you have a clear thesis you can go back to your list of selected evidence and group all the similar details together.
The ideas that tie these clusters of evidence together can then become the claims that youll make in your paper. As you
begin thinking about what claims you can make (i.e. what kinds of conclusion you can come to) keep in mind that they
should not only relate to all the evidence but also clearly support your thesis. Once youre satisfied with the way youve grouped your
evidence and with the way that your claims relate to your thesis, you can begin to consider the most logical way to
organize each of those claims. To support my thesis about Frankenstein, Ive decided to group my evidence
chronologically. Ill start with Victors education at home, then discuss his learning at the University, and finally address
his own experiments. This arrangement will let me show that Victor was always prone to isolation in his education and
that this tendency gets stronger as he becomes more ambitious.
There are certainly other organizational options that might work better depending on the type of points I want to stress.
I could organize a discussion of education by the various forms of education found in the novel (for example, education
through reading, through classrooms, and through observation), by specific characters (education for Victor, the
monster, and Victor's bride, Elizabeth), or by the effects of various types of education (those with harmful, beneficial, or
neutral effects).
9. Interpret your evidence
Avoid the temptation to load your paper with evidence from your story. Each time you use a specific reference to your story, be
sure to explain the significance of that evidence in your own words. To get your readers interest, you need to draw their attention to
elements of the story that they wouldnt necessarily notice or understand on their own. If youre quoting passages
without interpreting them, youre not demonstrating your reasoning skills or helping the reader. In most cases,
interpreting your evidence merely involves putting into your paper what is already in your head. Remember that we, as
readers, are lazyall of us. We dont want to have to figure out a writers reasoning for ourselves; we want all the
thinking to be done for us in the paper.
General hints
The previous nine steps are intended to give you a sense of the tasks usually involved in writing a good interpretive
paper. What follows are just some additional hints that might help you find an interesting topic and maybe even make
the process a little more enjoyable.

160

1. Make your thesis relevant to your readers
Youll be able to keep your readers' attention more easily if you pick a topic that relates to daily experience. Avoid
writing a paper that identifies a pattern in a story but doesnt quite explain why that pattern leads to an interesting
interpretation. Identifying the biblical references in Frankenstein might provide a good start to a paperMary Shelley
does use a lot of biblical allusionsbut a good paper must also tell the reader why those references are meaningful. So
what makes an interesting paper topic? Simply put, it has to address issues that we can use in our own lives. Your thesis
should be able to answer the brutal question "So what?" Does your paper tell your reader something relevant about the
context of the story youre interpreting or about the human condition?
Some categories, like race, gender, and social class, are dependable sources of interest. This is not to say that all good
papers necessarily deal with one of these issues. My thesis on education in Frankenstein does not. But a lot of readers
would probably be less interested in reading a paper that traces the instances of water imagery than in reading a paper
that compares male or female stereotypes used in a story or that takes a close look at relationships between characters of
different races. Again, dont feel compelled to write on race, gender, or class. The main idea is that you ask yourself
whether the topic youve selected connects with a major human concern, and there are a lot of options here (for
example, issues that relate to economics, family dynamics, education, religion, law, politics, sexuality, history, and
psychology, among others).
Also, dont assume that as long as you address one of these issues, your paper will be interesting. As mentioned in step 2,
you need to address these big topics in a complex way. Doing this requires that you dont go into a topic with a
preconceived notion of what youll find. Be prepared to challenge your own ideas about what gender, race, or class mean
in a particular text.
2. Select a topic of interest to you
Though you may feel like you have to select a topic that sounds like something your instructor would be interested in,
dont overlook the fact that youll be more invested in your paper and probably get more out of it if you make the topic
something pertinent to yourself. Pick a topic that might allow you to learn about yourself and what you find important.
Of course, your topic cant entirely be of your choosing. Were always at the mercy of the evidence thats available to us.
For example, your interest may really be in political issues, but if youre reading Frankenstein, you might face some
difficulties in finding enough evidence to make a good paper on that kind of topic. If, on the other hand, youre
interested in ethics, philosophy, science, psychology, religion, or even geography, youll probably have more than enough
to write about and find yourself in the good position of having to select only the best pieces of evidence.
3. Make your thesis specific
The effort to be more specific almost always leads to a thesis that will get your readers attention, and it also separates
you from the crowd as someone who challenges ideas and looks into topics more deeply. A paper about education in
general in Frankenstein will probably not get my readers attention as much as a more specific topic about the impact of
the learning environment on the main character. My readers may have already thought to some extent about ideas of
education in the novel, if they have read it, but the chance that they have thought through something more specific like
the educational environment is slimmer.
Works consulted
We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of
resources on the handout's topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this
topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation
style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

161

Mary Shelleys Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Signet, 1965.
Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing About Literature. 9th ed. New York: Longman, 2003.

162

163

The Basic Structure of an Academic Essay
Thesis Statement
Your main claim for your paper - This is what you are trying to to prove. Your thesis must take a position that
genuinely can be argued from more than one side. It should be factual. It should not be so broad that it cannot be
adequately supported in the scope of your paper not so narrow that it cannot support a full analysis.
COMMENTARY
Your explanation of HOW the evidence proves your main idea, and in turn, your thesis. You must have commentary
for each piece of evidence. Commentary is the hear of your paper.
MAIN IDEAS / SUPPORT THESES
Support reasons WHY your thesis is true. Each reason must be supportable by facts.
EVIDENCE / CONCRETE DETAIL
Proof that supports your main idea must be supported by convincing evidence. Acceptable evidence includes
quotations, examples, statistics, or other factual information.
Thesis statements:
The thesis statement is the most important part of your paper. It states your purpose to your audience. In your thesis
statement, you explain what your paper will prove. The form of your thesis statement will vary depending on the form of
your writing. However, for most academic writing, your thesis should identify your subject and take a position on that
subject. A strong thesis statement will direct the structure of the essay. The thesis should be explicitly stated somewhere
in the opening paragraphs of your paper, most often as the last sentence of the introduction. Often a thesis will be one
sentence, but for complex subjects, you may find it less awkward to break the thesis into two sentences.
Check your thesis statement:
Have I identified my subject?
Is my subject narrow or broad enough for the scope of my paper?
Have I made a truly debatable claim regarding that subject?
Does the structure of my thesis statement give the reader an idea of the structure of my paper? Keep
Revising Your Thesis

164

Many students feel they need a "perfect" thesis before they an start writing their paper. However, you probably won't
even fully understand your topic until after you've written at least one draft. Keep testing and revising your thesis as you
write.
Sample thesis statements:
The United States government should not fund stem-cell research because such research is not ethical, cost-effective, or
medically necessary.
In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens shows the process by which a wasted life can be redeemed. Sidney Carton,
through his love for Lucie Manette, is transformed from a hopeless, bitter man into a hero whose life and death have
meaning.
America's use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II was an unnecessary action that caused unprecedented
civilian casualties for purely political ends.
Main ideas and support theses
As you develop your thesis statement, you also identify a number of main ideas or reasons why your thesis is true. Each
of these reasons is called a main idea or support thesis. Your major thesis states what you will prove in your whole
paper, while your support thesis states what you will prove in each paragraph or section. Each paragraph (or set of
paragraphs for longer papers) is organized around one of your main ideas:
________________________________________
Sometimes your main ideas will be stated in the major thesis. The reader will expect to see these main ideas treated in
this order in the writers paper.
The United States government should not fund stem-cell research because such research is not ethical, cost effective, or
medically necessary. Issues of right or wrong should come first when considering funds for stem cell research.
Stem cell research is too expensive.
Other methods can be used to conduct medical research
________________________________________
Sometimes the main ideas are implied by the major thesis.

165

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens shows the process by which a wasted life can be redeemed. Sidney Carton,
through his love for Lucie Manette, is transformed from a hopeless, bitter man into a hero whose life and death have
meaning. Sydney Carton is a hopeless, bitter man.
Sydney Carton is transformed by his love for Lucie Manette.
Sydney Cartons death redeems his wasted life.
________________________________________
Sometimes the main ideas are not directly stated in the major thesis and must be provided for the reader as the essay
progresses.
Americas use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II was an unnecessary action that caused unprecedented
civilian casualties for purely political ends. A conventional invasion would have cost lives, but the casualties would
have been limited to combatants.
A firebombing attack would have been effective, even if it cost some civilian lives.
Civilian causalities from the nuclear bombing and resulting fallout were far greater than they would have been from a
conventional invasion and firebombing attack combined.
The United States lost the moral high ground by using nuclear weapons first.
The United States used the atomic bomb not to save lives but for political and strategic reasons.
Evidence and concrete detail
Each of your main ideas must be supported by specific evidence, also called concrete detail. This evidence must be both
factual and convincing to the reader. It should clearly connect your main idea to your thesis by proving your point.
Acceptable evidence includes
material directly quoted from literature or research
expert opinion
historical facts
statistics
specific examples
other factual data

166

Start collecting evidence as soon as you know what topic you are going to write about, even if you dont have a thesis
statement or specific idea for your paper yet. Ways to collect evidence include
note cards
sticky notes
notes from class discussion
notes from lab experiments
charts or graphic organizers
dialectical journals
learning logs
highlighting reading material
Collecting Evidence:
Using colored sticky notes, note cards, or highlighters can help keep you organized!
Use a different color for each topic, and note important information as you read.
Adding Evidence to Your Writing
When you integrate your evidence into your paper, often you will use direct quotations, especially when writing about
literature.
See the sections on Parenthetical Documentation and Incorporating Quotations into your Writing for more on how to
do this.
Direct quotation:
When Carton and Darnay first meet at the tavern, Carton tells him, I care for no man on this earth, and no man cares
for me (Dickens 105).
Whenever you include a quotation from another source in your own writing, you must make sure that it fits
grammatically into your text. The quoted material should form a complete thought when added to your sentence. It
should be so smoothly integrated that it is impossible to tell where your voice leaves off and the quotation begins, were
it not for the quotation marks! Check your writing by reading it aloud.
Example:

167

Before his death, Sidney Carton envisions Lucie and Darnay telling their son his story, with a fair and faltering voice.
He achieves redemption when he goes to meet death, saying, It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever
done (Dickens 387).
Poorly integrated evidence makes your writing choppy and your point unclear to the reader.
Example:
Sidney Carton achieves redemption at the end of the book. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done
(Dickens 387).
You may also paraphrase or put the information into your own words. Remember always to cite the original source of
the information, even if you do not use a direct quotation.
Paraphrase:
According to Barton Bernstein, President Truman and his administration did not even pursue alternatives to dropping
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (288).
Whether you use direct quotations or paraphrase to incorporate your evidence, you MUST avoid plagiarizing your
original sources. It is considered plagiarism to
use another writers exact words w/o quotation marks and a citation
use another writers ideas or line of thinking w/o a citation
use another writers key terminology or even sentence structure in your paraphrase, even WITH a citation
Commentary
Commentary refers to your explanation and interpretation of the evidence you present in your paper. Commentary tells
the reader how the concrete detail connects to your main idea and proves your point. It does NOT summarize or
restate the same information contained in the concrete detail. Commentary may include interpretation, analysis,
argument, insight, and/or reflection. The ratio of commentary to concrete detail will vary depending on the form and
purpose of your essay.
Examples of Commentary on Concrete Details
Concrete Detail | Commentary
When Caron and Darnay first meet at the tavern, Carton tells him, I care for no man on this earth, and no man cares
for me (Dickens 105). Carton makes this statement as if he were excusing his rude behavior to Darnay. Carton,

168

however, is only pretending to be polite, perhaps to amuse himself. With this seemingly off-the-cuff remark, Carton
reveals a deeper cynicism and his emotional isolation.
Acccording to Baron Bernstein, President Truman and his administration did not even pursue alternatives to dropping
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (288).Rather than attempt other, more conventional, methods such as non-nuclear
bombing raids and ground force invasion, the United States pushed forward a devastating attack on essentially civilian
targets. The Truman administration simply wanted to prove the power of the Allied forces to cause extreme damage to
innocent civilian populations. This action was intended to prove American strength and willingness to use its power not
just to the Japanese, but the USSR as well.
________________________________________
When writing commentary, you must always keep your audience and purpose in mind. Consider the following questions
as you look at your evidence:
Why is this example particularly apt or fitting?
What does this example reveal about my topic?
What do I want my reader to gain or understand from my use of this example?
How does my example prove or illustrate the main idea of my paragraph?
How does my example prove my thesis?
How does my example relate to other examples that I have already discussed or plan to discuss later in my
paper?
Transitions
Transitions are words that help the audience follow your train of thought. Transitions help the reader connect new
information to what he or she has just read.
Transition words can be used to
Show location above, across, near, between, inside, below, throughout
Show time after, as soon as, finally, during, then, when, next
Compare also, likewise, as, similarly
Contrast although, however, but, even though, yet
Emphasize this reason, especially, in fact, in particular

169

Draw conclusions as a result, finally, therefore, in conclusion, thus
Add information additionally, for example, besides, moreover, also
Clarify that is, in other words, for instance
Lead-ins are special transitions that provide context for the reader when introducing evidence or concrete detail. A lead-
in should include the essential information needed to make sense of the example that follows it. Information in a lead-in
may include
speakers name, title, or qualifications
location, time, or setting of the quotation
situation or occasion when the quotation was made
Notice in the following examples how the lead-ins provide context for each quotation, but also include some of the
writers own commentary to help the audience understand the purpose of the quotations.
Later, however, when the confident Sidney Carton returns alone to his home, his alienation and unhappiness become
apparent: Climbing into a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed,
and its pillow was wet with wasted tears (Dickens 211).
The Stem Cell Research Foundation opposes cloning used to create children, but believes that some kinds of cloning
have legitimate scientific benefits. According to their position statement, Reproductive cloning has been shown to be
highly unsafe in animals, and we do not believe its use is acceptable in humans. However, the cloning of a patients cells
in order to create genetically compatible stem cells, also called therapeutic cloning . . . may lead to cures for serious and
often deadly diseases (Stem Cell Research).
Introductions
An introduction is like a first impression; you want your readers to think your paper is interesting enough to be worth
their time. Most people form first impressions very quickly, so it is important to catch your readers interest from the
start with an attention-getter or creative opening:
Attention-getting Openings
A startling fact or bit of information
A meaningful quotation
A universal idea related to your thesis

170

A rich, vivid description or image
A fresh analogy or metaphor
An interesting anecdote, story, or dramatic episode
A thought-provoking question
Beginning in the middle of the action

Save the First for Last
While it is important to have at least a working version of your major thesis as you start to write, you can usually save the
introduction for later. That way it will introduce what you actually have written, instead of what you had intended to
write. In addition, you can tie your introduction more effectively to your conclusion by writing them both at the same
time.
Openings to Avoid
o Dictionary definitions of words your reader should know
o Rhetorical questions that use the word you (Did you know )
o An announcement of topic (This paper will be about )
o Overly broad or general statements (There are many novels, all of which have characters. Some characters are
heroes, and some are not.)
o A book report list of irrelevant facts (William Shakespeare lived in the Elizabethan era in England. He wrote
many plays. One of these plays was Hamlet.)
Once you have your readers attention, you should provide essential background about your topic and prepare the reader
for your major thesis. A strong introduction functions as a map for the rest of the essay, previewing major ideas that
you will consider in your paper. Finally, end your introduction with your major thesis. Because the major thesis
sometimes sounds tacked on, make special attempts to link it to the sentence that precedes it by building on a key word
or idea.
Map Your Course
When previewing your main topics in your introduction, make sure you list them in the order in which they appear in
your paper. The introduction should serve as a map to the reader, showing where the essay is headed.

171

Conclusions
Your conclusion wraps up your argument and leaves the reader with some final thoughts. Your conclusion should stem
from what you have already written. Effective conclusions, therefore, often refer back to ideas presented in a papers
introduction.
In general, your conclusion should echo your major thesis without repeating the words verbatim. However, since your
paper has already proven your thesis, your conclusion should move beyond it to reflect on the significance of the ideas
you just presented. It should answer the readers question, OK, Ive read your paper, but so what? In other words,
why are your ideas important for the reader?
Effective Conclusions
Effective conclusions always consider the audience and purpose. Depending on your papers purpose, you may use one
or more of the following ideas:

Reflect on how your topic relates to larger issues (in the novel, in society, in history)
Show how your topic affects the readers life
Evaluate the concepts you have presented
Issue a call for action on the part of your audience
Ask questions generated by your findings
Make predictions
Recommend a solution
Connect back to introduction, esp. if you used a metaphor, anecdote, or vivid image
Give a personal statement about the topic
Conclusions to Avoid
Beginning with In conclusion
Restating or summarizing the main points of your paper without providing further insight into the significance
of these ideas
Bringing up a new topic not previously covered in your paper
Adding irrelevant details (esp. just to make a paper longer)

172

Preaching or lecturing to your audience
Overstating or over-generalizing the connection to larger issues
Sounding clichd, hollow, or insincere
Lapsing into the use of the pronoun you

Updated 6/23/03 by D.Hogan
Poway Unified School District
February 2003

173

Writing Papers of Literary Analysis:
Some Advice for Student Writers
by Seamus Cooney
Key Points:
line is the most essential unit of sound, the unit
of meaning is the sentence, just as in prose.
iting about fiction, remember that summary alone is worthless.
Organization
One excellent kind of paper presents a thesis and marshals arguments to support it, not forgetting to mention
also the possible arguments against it (and to refute them, or concede to them where necessary). In general, the
best shape here is a very brief opening statement of your thesis, then several carefully unified paragraphs in
support, and finally a restatement, probably in fuller form, of the thesis.
A thesis is a sentence that makes an argument -- says something that has to be proved or back-up. When you
read or hear a good thesis statement, your reaction will be "Really?" or "How do you figure that?" or "Oh yeah?
Prove it!" or "That sounds interesting -- tell me more." In short, a thesis will set up the paper and prepare the
reader to consider the evidence.
A paper that begins with a thesis arouses interest. Contrast the deadening flat effect of beginning with a mere
factual statement. Which of the following makes you more willing to read on?
o Ernest Hemingway wrote many short stories, some of which are as famous as his novels.
o Hemingway's short stories achieve through compression and understatement emotional effects as
powerful as any he achieved in his novels.
Another excellent kind of paper might be called a process paper -- one in which you allow your reader to
participate with you in the process of your thinking (and feeling). In this kind of paper, you might begin by
saying what it is you want to look for or examine, and then lead the reader through a step by step journey of
discovery -- perhaps the examination of a text piece by piece, or even (if it's short enough) line by line, or
sentence by sentence.
Whatever kind of paper you write, give it a helpful title. Don't call it "Final Paper" (that gives no relevant
information); don't give it the name of the work you're writing about; and and avoid sweeping titles like
"Wordsworth" or "Man's Place in Nature"! Aim for an unpretentious descriptive title, like "Nature Imagery in
Three Poems by Modern Poets" or "Hemingway's Implied Attitude Toward Lady Brett". Adjust your title to
the actual paper that gets written, just as you will need to adjust your opening paragraph. Titles and openings
are, in fact, best written last.
Content: what to say
Never avoid saying the obvious: it's usually true. But don't spend a lot of time on it -- acknowledge its
obviousness, perhaps by a word like "Clearly, ...." Then move on to something less obvious.
Don't worry that something that you 've just figured out will be obvious or familiar to someone else. Even if
this should be the case, it's still a pleasure for the reader to share in another person's discovery of it.
A good general principle to maintain your confidence is that if you find something interesting enough to say
carefully, it'll be interesting enough for your reader.

174

An ideal paper is one in which the writer discovers something and shares his or her pleasure in the discovery
with a reader. The discovery may be an interpretation of a challenging story or poem (or portion thereof), or it
may just be the discovery of what you really think about something or other. ("How do I know what I think
until I see what I've said," Churchill is supposed to have said.) To discover your own considered opinion or
valuation of the work you're writing about is a satisfying outcome to a paper.
Avoid apologizing for what you say. It goes without saying that the views and interpretations you offer are
yours, doesn't it? So there's no need for such boring and weasily phrases as "It seems to me" or "In my
opinion."
This does not mean you must avoid the first person singular. Use it where appropriate -- remembering,
however, that a paper of literary commentary is not a piece of autobiography, so that your private self should
not be in the foreground. But if you were told in school not to use "I," forget that advice! The pompousness of
locutions like "The present writer" is ludicrous in a student paper.
The only kind of originality that matters at all is finding the source of your ideas and feelings within yourself:
being true to that origin. In a class paper, it doesn't in the least matter if what you say has been said before. In
any case, it's not been said in the same way, and the study of literature should surely have brought home to you
that the way of saying something is part of its meaning.
Use concepts and terms you've worked with (for poetry: tone, diction, imagery, paraphrase, metrics, etc.; for
fiction: characterization, plot, climax, symbolism, theme, etc.). But remember it's best to use them only when
they pay off, not automatically. Paraphrase, for example, should be used selectively, when a line or sentence has
a tricky meaning, or a meaning you're uncertain of but want to spell out as best you can. It would be tedious to
automatically paraphrase every bit of poetry you wrote about.
In writing about fiction, you will find more interesting things to say if you focus on characterization rather
than characters. Writing about characters too often means writing as though they were real people,
speculating about what happened before or after the action of the book or story, and other imponderables like
that. Characters in a work of fiction are not real people, but rather careful constructs that resemble real people.
Focussing on characterization means studying how the writer presents the character -- what selection of detail is
used, what mixture of direct "showing" to indirect "telling," what implied valuations are being made, and the
like.
While some special literary terminology is useful and economical, avoid jargon. Don't think to impress anyone
by using big words where simpler words would do. Be wary, especially, of loose vague terms like "theme" or
"postmodern."
Rule of thumb: when you quote supporting passages from the text being discussed, never let the quotation just
lie there on the page inertly; make use of it, put it to work point to specific features or details or words in it, say
what you see, what it is that makes you want to let the reader have it before him. It's no good (in a class paper)
saying to yourself that the reader can surely work out the point for himself: in this context, it's up to you to do
the work. After all, one of your purposes is to persuade your instructor/reader that you yourself can see.
Avoid plot summary for its own sake. Whatever may have been the case in high school, in college literature
courses you get no particular credit for simply having read and followed the contents of a poem or story or
novel. Thus, sentences or paragraphs in which you simply recount what happens or what is said are of no value
in a paper about literature.
Exception: If a piece of writing is really tricky to decipher and you feel you've succeeded in doing so after
some effort, it may be appropriate to lay your cards on the table. For example, "Stanza 2 is syntactically
difficult. I understand it to be saying: ..." -- and give your paraphrase. Or, "What happens next in the story is
obscure. From the hints given in the next section, I take it that ..." -- and say what you make out, citing the
evidence.
Summarizing content in order to make a point in your argument, on the other hand, is an entirely different
matter and is very much an appropriate part of papers. Provided that you subordinate the summary to a
critical point that you are making, you'll be okay.
Compare:

175

1. Hamlet then goes to talk with his mother in her bedroom or "closet"
2. and grows more and more angry as he talks to her. Finally, he has a vision
3. of his father's Ghost, and this restores him to some calmness.
4.
5.
6. When Hamlet talks to his mother in her bedroom or "closet," his reproaches
7. to her grow more and more angry and uncontrolled. Ironically, it's only
8. his vision of the Ghost -- which she interprets as his madness -- that
9. restores him to some degree of reasonableness.
In the first version, the writer seems to think that his summary is sufficiently interesting to hold our attention,
but it just isn't -- not for anyone who has read the play. In the second version, the bits of summary are made to
serve some point of interpretation or comment.
To repeat: summary should always be ofered as a way of supporting a point you are making about the story or
poem. Ideally, there should be no neutral narrative sentences about the characters or the action, such as "Ferris
goes to visit his wife" or "The Duke then conducts his visitor downstairs." Instead, all such bits of summary
should be in support of an interpretative point or comment: "When Ferris goes to visit his wife, he discovers
that ..." or "The Duke's unpertured courtesy of manner can be heard as he invites his visitor to 'go / Together
down' with him," etc.
To put it another way: do not write a paper about the characters in a story; instead write about the story itself --
its words, its shaping or organization, its high points, symbolism, etc.
For more advanced students:
An aspect of writing -- both poetry and prose -- that well repays attention and which will often yield valuable
observations about authors' style is their syntax. For some beginning observations, click here.
Style
Even if you're laboring worriedly to find plausible things to say in your papers, it still might be profitable to you
to examine your style and perhaps loosen it a little. Relax and speak like (in Wordsworth's pre-feminist phrase)
"a man speaking to men." Of course, to speak personally should not entail garrulity.
o Use the first person singular as you would in natural speaking. Avoid horrors such as "the present
writer"!
o Offer your opinions freely, where relevant, but don't apologize for them with phrases like "in my
personal opinion" or "it seems to me." It goes without saying that your writing expresses you personal
opinions, doesn't it?
o Write informally but without slang. You don't want to sound like a self-important pompous ass, but
neither are you shooting the bull over a six-pack.
Student writers should make some effort -- or at least be aware of the desirability of an effort -- towards
achieving a more than pedestrian style. Grammatical competence is something to be assumed as present, at this
level of study. But what about a spark of liveliness in the writing? Maybe the following questions will help you
move in the right direction.
o Have you read your paper out loud, listening for awkward repetitions and try to hear if the sound
flows and if the sentences sound like a college educated person? If you can, get a friend willing to
listen and follow your meaning, and then keep watching his or her face for signs of bewilderment or
of pleased comprehension.
o Have you a sentence or two in your paper that pleases you with its rhythm or construction?
o Take a look at your sentence structure: are they all subject + predicate constructions?

176

o Do you ever build a cumulative sentence, using participial phrases?
o Do you ever use a rhetorical question?
o Does sentence length vary?
o Do you have an occasional Jamesian-complex sentence?
o An occasional punchy fragment?
o What about your punctuation?
How often have you had occasion to use the semicolon?
Or even better, my personal favorite: the colon?
Paired dashes?
o And what about italics for conversational emphasis? (I probably overuse italics in these notes, but do
you ever use them at all? (On the word processor, all it takes is pushing a button.)
A suggestion: it might be helpful to read a page of some author whose style you admire and find congenial just
before you write or revise your own work. Asked to name critics who write stylishly, I'd offer this random list:
T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Mrs. Q. D. Leavis, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, Jonathan Williams, Henry James,
Tom Wolfe, Roland Barthes (via Richard Howard), James Baldwin, William Empson.
Mechanics
Be duly embarrassed if you make more than an occasional blunder such as lack of subject-verb agreement. Aim
for standard educated English -- but let's all remember that educated speakers and writers make such "errors"
often enough, and correctness of this kind is a secondary consideration.
I won't do more than simply mention here the more common mistakes that irritate instructors, things like
to/too/two;
they're/their/there;
alot/allot/a lot;
lose/loose;
lay/lie;
then/than;
alright/all right;
and the like. Like spelling errors, these are slips almost anyone can make on occasion in a first draft. They
should not survive the careful proofreading that writers who care about their writing subject each piece to. If
you are in doubt about any of them, look them up in the dictionary and read the entry carefully. If necessary,
write yourself a reminder note and stick it above your desk. (If you find it easier to look for help here, go a
brief discussion of these common errors.)
Use the past tense to talk about biographical facts or publication data but the present tense to talk about what
goes on in a work of fiction or poetry. Example: "Plath's Ariel was published after her death, but the poems
show many premonitions of disaster to come."
For on-line help with style and mechanics, consult Elements of Style by William Strunk, perhaps the most famous
style manual in English.
Documentation and quoting
Commonsense, adequacy to purpose, and consistency are the criteria. Use MLA or APA style as you choose.
Bear in mind the purpose: to make it as easy as possible for your reader to check your accuracy and fairness in
the use of your sources.
This shouldn't need sayingl, but it does. If you are quoting poetry, be sure to retain the line breaks. If you're
running a very short quote into your own prose, use the slash to mark the line break. If you are quoting more
than a couple of lines, set them off by indenting and single spacing, and type them line for line as they appear
in the source.

177

Brief parenthetical notes are much preferred to footnotes, whenever they can satisfy the purpose. Avoid
footnotes or endnotes giving nothing but a page number (Heaney 47). Place such references in parentheses
following the quotation. And keep them to a sensible minimum: if you're quoting four short bits from the same
source in a single paragraph of your paper, you need only give the page reference following the last one. Above
all, never use a note that merely says "ibid." The reader who goes to the trouble to turn to the back of an essay
only to find such an unhelpful note will feel infuriated.
In longer papers about poetry, especially, I find it helpful to have the entire text of the poem you're working on
included, either in its place as needed or as an appendix. It's just one more way you show consideration for
your reader.
Accuracy in quoting is crucially important! Change nothing from your source without showing that you're
doing so -- not spelling, not capitalization, not line breaks, not paragraphing. And your quotations must fit
into your own sentence in a way that makes sense. This point is important and often causes trouble. For a
fuller discussion with examples, click here.
If you're writing a paper which draws on research you've done ("research" nowdays simply means reading
books and articles in the library!), cite your sources scrupulously but as unobtrusively as possible. Do not write
like this:
In the first article I read about Hemingway, the author surprised
me by pointing out that Hemingway's first job was as a newspaper
reporter (Jones 23).
Rather, subordinate the research to the results it brought you:

Hemingway's first job was as a newspaper reporter (Jones 23).
Give the information directly; your note shows that you're indebted for it to the source named.
Pet peeves
Some errors and flaws annoy me perhaps inordinately. Anyone can make slips in subject-verb
agreement or in spelling, but errors which derive from pretentiousness or from nervously
"correcting" what isn't wrong (e.g. "to my brother and me") are especially apt to destroy the
reader's trust in the voice coming through the writing.
Common sense should tell you that ellipses have no function at the beginning of a quotation which begins in
the middle of a sentence or is a mere phrase. Such a quotation is is obviously fragmentary. It is pedantic to
precede and follow it with ellipses. The function of ellipses is to show you've omitted something when it
wouldn't otherwise be clear you had.
Distinguish between the hyphen (used to join elements of compound words; often over-used in British writing
but under-used in American) and the dash (used to indicated added-on bits of sentences -- like this) and use
them correctly. Paired dashes set off parenthetical elements -- bits that are less separable than parentheses
might indicate -- from the main flow of your sentence.
Note that the hyphen is available on the keyboard as a single keystroke, but the dash is not. It must be either
typed as two hyphens (sometimes -- though this is less accepted, since it's potentially confusing -- as a single
hyphen with a space before and after it) or invoked by a word-processor-specific command to produce the
proper typographical effect.
Speaking of effects, if you confuse the words affect and effect, you should drum into your head, "'Affect' is a
verb, 'effect' is a noun!" For example:

178

o His constant talking affected the other students' ability to concentrate.
o The effect of his talking was to disrupt the class atmosphere.
Once you've got a firm hold of that maxim, you can then go on to realize that it isn't always true, in that less
frequently "affect" can be a noun and "effect" a verb. Confused? Then stick with the simple maxim. Otherwise,
consult a dictionary, or consider the following sentences:
o He spoke like a computer, without affect of any kind.
o His new clothes effected a transformation in the way people thought of him.
Shall and will: people who enjoy grammatical precision find the common American confusion in the use of
"shall" very annoying. The solution is simple: never use shall! It's almost always a pretentious affectation,
especially in student writing.
I hate the following ugly usage:
"If he would have told me that earlier, I would have known what to do"
instead of "If he had told me ...."
My distaste here may be a sign of adherence to a lost cause, since one hears the "wrong" usage everywhere
nowdays. It's part of a general obsolescence of subjunctive forms. Other examples of this obsolescence,
however, seem to me quite acceptable: "If he was here, I'd tell him what I thought" is (to me) an acceptable
alternative to the more elegant "If he were here, I'd tell him what I thought."
Misplaced main subject: compare these two beginnings.
o "In Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, he begins by describing ..."
o "In his novel,The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway begins by describing ..."
The latter form is much superior, placing the author's name in the emphatic position as subject of the main
clause rather than in an introductory phrase.
Here's an annoying instance of an absence of commonsense in scholarly documentation: the failure, when
citing a reprint, to give the date of first publication. Compare these two versions of a possible end note:
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: New American Library, 1961), 5.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; rept. New York: New American Library, 1961), 5.
The first version makes it sound as though the novel was first published in 1961. When the work cited is less
well known than Jane Austen, this habit can be seriously misleading.
Caution: Other people's pet peeves:
Personally, I find it acceptable to use the plural "they / them / their" as a gender-neutral pronoun, especially
after words like "everybody" and "everyone." The argument that "everyone" must be singular because it
contains the word "one" is pedantic in the extreme. What counts in language is not logic but usage. Most
educated people do this in speaking, and it has a long tradition of acceptance by distinguished writers. If you
have a particularly fussy instructor, however, you may find this marked unacceptable. In that case, "him or her"
becomes unavoidable, clumsy as it. (The unspeakable -- literally and figuratively -- "s/he" gimmickry is to be
eschewed by all save writers who prefer political correctness to a graceful style.)

179

Consult a discussion by linguists of gender neutral language and a delightful and instructive anti- pedantry page
about how "Jane Austen and other famous authors violate what everyone learned in their English class".

180

181

IX. The Seven Elements of Fiction

182

183

The Seven Elements of Fiction: The Most Dangerous Game

Setting: The setting of the story
is usually found in the exposition and sets the time and place of the story.
can change throughout the story and can influence the conflict.
often sets the mood and is sometimes symbolic of the conflict.
can be specific or general.
What is the setting in The Most Dangerous Game?

184

Central Idea (Theme)
The central idea is the authors implied or direct comment on the subject of the story.
The central idea may raise questions about human nature or the human condition, or it may attempt
to answer a question.
What is the central idea of The Most Dangerous Game?

185

Character
Protagonist: Central character and focus of interest
Antagonist: Person, idea, force, or general set of circumstances opposing the protagonist
The reader comes to know the characters of a story through:
Their appearance.
Their words, thoughts, feelings, and actions.
How others react to them and what they say of them.
What the narrator tells the reader.
Describe the characters in The Most Dangerous Game

186

Conflict
The pattern in which the protagonist meets and resolves the conflict is called the plot. It is made up
of the exposition, hook, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (dnouement).
Map the plot to The Most Dangerous Game.

Internal Conflicts
Person vs. Self
External Conflicts
Person vs. Person
Person vs. Nature
Person vs. Society
Person vs. Supernatural

What is the primary conflict in The Most Dangerous Game? Are there any secondary conflicts?

187

Point of View
Dramatic
3
rd
Person Omniscient
3
rd
Person Limited
1
st
Person Limited
Language
Diction
Authors word choice (denotation and connotation)
Figurative
Imagery, similes, metaphors, allusions, repetition
Symbolism
Characters, actions, and objects that represent something other than their literal
interpretation
Irony
Verbal, dramatic, and situational
Dialog
Words spoken between two or more characters
Syntax
Arrangement of words within the sentence

188

189

Student Notes on The Seven Elements of Fiction

Elements of the Short Story: Setting

The setting of the story
is usually found in the ____________and sets the time and place of the story.
can change throughout the story and can influence the _____________.
often sets the _____________ and is sometimes symbolic of the conflict.
can be specific or general.
What is the setting in The Most Dangerous Game?

Setting
Central Idea
(Theme)
Character
Conflict
Point of View
Language
Tone

Sources for further information:

Books
Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary pp. 4-
28
Analyzing Short Stories pp. 1-60

Websites
http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/lit-
elements/overview/
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/
elements.asp

190

Elements of the Short Story: Central Idea (Theme)

The central idea is the authors ____________or ____________comment on the subject of
the story.
The central idea may raise questions about ______________ or the __________________, or
it may attempt to answer a question.
What is the central idea of The Most Dangerous Game?

The central idea
Is the _______________________________________ behind fiction
Is a general statement about the meaning of the story
Is ___________________________ limited to just these ________________________in
this ___________________________(cannot be stated as a summary)
Can be derived by analyzing all of the ____________________of the story to see how they
work together
Is the authors ________________________________comment on the subject of the story
Can attempt to raise or answer a question about human nature or the human condition
How to find the central idea:
Look for changes or ________________________________ in one of the elements of the
story

191

Identify how all of the elements work together
What is the conflict?
Who are the characters and what are their relationships?
What does the setting establish or contribute?
In what ___________________________________ is the story told? If first
person, is the narrator the protagonist? Can he or she be trusted?
What is the ______________________________of the story?
What language choices does the author make?
Examples of central idea:
When we write about the central idea, it helps to identify what the authors purpose was in writing it.
Stories that make a comment about human nature
Kate Chopins story The Story of an Hour expresses the deep desire for freedom that
some might not even recognize within themselves until they are offered a glimpse of it.
Stories that make a philosophical point about life and existence
In The Scarlet Ibis, Hurst implies that some people born to this world are too frail
to live long in such a violent place. Hurst is also commenting on the beauty and exoticness of that
fragility and how those lives should be valued, the more so because they are fleeting.
Stories that have a moral or teach a lesson
The moral of Aesops fable The Tortoise and Hare is that it is better to work carefully
than to quickly.

192

Stories that are meant purely for entertainment
The central theme of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is terror that arises from the
complexity and multiplicity of forces that shape human destiny. Dreadful, horrifying events result
not from a single, uncomplicated circumstance but from a collision and intermingling of manifold,
complex circumstances.

Example thesis statements incorporating the central idea
When analyzing a short story for one element, sometimes restricting your analysis to one aspect of
the central idea will help focus your writing.
Broad Thesis Statement (Setting)
The setting of The Most Dangerous Game takes the reader through oceans, jungles, and a
mansion in a grand adventure that explores the preys perspective of a hunt, particularly when
the prey is human.
Specific Thesis Statement (Setting and Conflict)
Richard Connells adventure story balances the wildness of the jungle to the civility of the mansion
so that in the end, Rainsford must kill General Zaroff in the mansion as man ridding the world of a
horrific murderer, rather than in the jungle as a prey turning on his predator in a chance of luck, and
by doing so demonstrates the underlying theme of sympathy for the prey.

Avoid these pitfalls when writing about the central idea:
It is a theme, not a summary.
The central idea is not limited to just these characters in this place in this situation.

193

Some interpretations will vary.
Not every reader will state the central idea in exactly the same way.
Do not dismiss an element of the story in order to force your interpretation.
Sometimes we need to tweak our wording or understanding of the central idea so that all of
the elements clearly align.
You may not agree with the central idea presented.
We can like a story but disagree with the central idea. Do not be tempted to transform the
authors intent to what you would prefer

194

Elements of the Short Story: Character

Protagonist:

Antagonist:

The reader comes to know the characters of a story through:
Their ___________________.
Their words, ____________, feelings, and ______________.
How others react to them and what they say of them.
What the _______________ tells the reader.

Who is the protagonist in The Most Dangerous Game?

Who is the Antagonist in The Most Dangerous Game?

A characters personality can be revealed either directly or indirectly. Consider each of the following
in a character analysis:

What the ___________________ says
What the ___________________ says
What other characters say about him or her
What the character _______________
What the character does

195

What the character is ________________ or what he or she looks like
Some character terminology:

Protagonist: the major or central character in the plot
Antagonist: the person, idea, force, or object that acts against the protagonist
Stereotype: a character who conforms to a _____________________ already established in
literature who requires very little explanation from the author (e.g. bully football player, the spinster
librarian)
Foil: two characters with opposing characteristics set against each other in order to emphasize the
characteristics of each (for example a very smart person paired with a very dumb person)

Round vs. Flat Characters
A character is described as being round if he or she has a multiple aspects to his or her personality
much like a real person. Secondary characters, stereotypes, or underdeveloped characters are
described as flat.
Round characters:
Are complex, _______________________________ characters
Play a more significant role in the story (major characters)
Are rarely summarized by just one characteristic
Might resemble ____________________________________________

Flat characters:
Are only partially developed
Are usually____________________ or supporting characters
Have only those portions of the character necessary for the advancement of the story
revealed
Are easily ________________________
Might be a stereotype

196

Dynamic vs. Static Characters
Often in a short story, characters will experience an event or have a revelation that changes who he
or she is, what he or she believes, or how he or she lives. Characters who experience such a change
are described as dynamic, and those who dont change are described as static.
Dynamic characters:
Experience something that causes them to change their way of ___________________,
their patterns of ___________________, or value system
Static characters:
Do not experience any ________________________ throughout the story
Do not learn a lesson or _________________________ as a person
Maintain the same values or behaviors throughout the story

Consider the characters we have encountered so far in our reading. Which are round, flat, dynamic,
or static?

Round Flat Dynamic Static

197

Elements of the Short Story: Conflict

The pattern in which the protagonist meets and resolves the conflict is called the plot. It is
made up of the exposition, hook, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution
(dnouement).
Map the plot to The Most Dangerous Game.

198

Exposition

What is the primary conflict in The Most Dangerous Game? Are there any secondary
conflicts?

Elements of the Short Story: Point of View

1
st
Person Limited
3
rd
Person Limited
3
rd
Person Omniscient
Dramatic Narration (Detached Observer)

199

X. Student Essay: Exemplars

200

201

The Story of an Hour
By Kate Chopin
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as
gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half
concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the
newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name
leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second
telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept
its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the
storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed
down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the
new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying
his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless
sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled
one above the other in the west facing her window.

202

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a
sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob
in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength.
But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those
patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent
thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not
know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward
her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was
approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her
two white slender hands would have been.
When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over
and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had
followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing
blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted
perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face
that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that

203

bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she
opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There
would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women
believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel
intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of
illumination.
And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the
unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly
recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission.
"Louise, open the door! I beg, open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing Louise?
For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that
open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all
sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only
yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph
in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's
waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

204

Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little
travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of
accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at
Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease-- of joy that kills

The Short Story - Literary Analysis and Composition.docx 205

Christalyn Grantier
Prof. C. Agatucci
Period 1
4 November 2002
Plot vs. Point of View in Chopin's "Story of an Hour"
Kate Chopins Story of an Hour tells the tale of
an evolution of a character in a single hour. Chopin
accomplishes this by using a specific point of view and unique
plot to carry out her vision. These elements work together to
create a theme that has the greatest impact on the reader.
Ann Charters defines point of view as the
authors choice of narrator for the story (1009). The Story
of an Hour is told from the viewpoint of a third-person
narrator. This speaker is a non-participant in the story
(Charters 1009). Never does the narrator include herself in the
plot of Hour. Specifically, this speaker has only limited
omniscience as she relates the story. According to Charters, a
speaker with limited omniscience is able to know what is going
on in the mind of a single character, but not have a full
understanding of, or chooses not to reveal to the readers, the
minds of all the characters (Charters 1009). For example, the
emotions and thoughts of Mrs. Mallard are fully described within
the story. We see her grief, but also the thoughts of freedom


that begin to come to her mind (Chopin 157-8). Because the
narrator does not show all the aspects of the story, it allows
the fact of her husband being alive to be a surprise (Chopin
158). The narrator, because he or she is not a member of the
story, may be able to be trusted more by the reader than a
person involved directly in the story (Charters 1010). The
narrator is considered more objective (Agatucci 4).
The author, Kate Chopin, was a great admirer of Guy
de Maupassant, a writer of the realist genre (Agatucci 4).
Maupassant stated that The writers goal is to reproduce this
illusion of life faithfully (Maupassant 898). Chopin used a
point of view in Story of an Hour very similar to that of
Maupassant when he wrote The Necklace. The authors factual
account allows a reader to experience this illusion of life.
According to Maupassant, a writer should find a new way of
looking at a situation (Charters 523). Chopin, in attempting to
imitate the genre embraced by this author, looked at a situation
of the death of a husband in a unique way. She accomplished
this by presenting the true feelings of a widow and contrasting
those feelings with societys beliefs. Working in the realistic
genre, Chopin presented a more disillusioned view of life
(Agatucci 4). Chopin did not portray the accepted norms of
society. She did not state that the wife could not go on


without her husband. By contrast, she viewed her story with a
new concept, that of a wife feeling empowered to go on living
because her husband was no longer alive.
The thoughts and actions of these characters can be
seen in the development of the plot. Point of view is how a
reader is able to look into a story; the plot is the arrangement
of the incidents themselves (Charter 1003, 1009). Charters
defines plot as the sequence of events in a story and their
relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a
conflict (1003). The sequences within this story are quite
short because this story occurs in the course of a single hour.
The conflict present in this story is all within the
protagonist, the main character of [the] narrative (Charters
1051). Without the view which allows the reader to see inside
the mind of Mrs. Mallard, the reader would not be aware of the
true conflict. Without this insight, a reader might assume, like
Mrs. Mallards sister, that the conflict of the wife was the
grief associated with her husbands death (Chopin 158). The
point of view allows the reader to see the true conflict within
the plot and to sense the freedom that is eventually embraced by
the protagonist (Chopin 158).
The life of the author seems to have an impact on
the plot. Kate Chopin had a very similar experience as Mrs.


Mallard in the tragic death of her father. Chopins father
perished when she was young in a train accident (Chopin 157; and
Katherine Chopin). Also, she did not begin writing until
after her mother and husband had both passed away (Katherine
Chopin). She herself stated that If it were possible for my
husband and my mother to come back to earth, I feel that I would
unhesitatingly give up every thing that has come into my life
since they left it and join my existence again with theirs. To
do that, I would have to forget the past ten years of my growth
-- my real growth (O'Brien). This suggests Chopin sympathized
with Mrs. Mallard, who had found new freedom in the death of a
loved one (Chopin 158). Kate Chopin had a bicultural
background. According to Contemporary Authors, this authors
great-grandmother related stories of her ancestors, including
those about notorious infidels (Katherine Chopin). This may
have given Chopin confidence to explore topics not generally
discussed by the society of her day.
The plot itself has some very distinct
characteristics that are of the literary realism genre. First,
it is believable. Most people believe that heart disease and
train accidents do exist (Chopin 157). Authors writing within
this style often chose to look at the nature of human beings
(Agatucci 3). The entire plot of Story of An Hour is that of


describing the nature of the characters. The plot begins by
depicting the reaction of Mrs. Mallards sister and Mr.
Mallards friend (Chopin 157). The evolution of the emotional
nature of Mrs. Mallard is described as she sits alone
(Chopin157-158). Finally, we see the nature of society at that
time, totally ignorant of the true feelings felt by the wife
about her husband. Agatucci describes this impact on characters
such as Mrs. Mallard as ordinary people of contemporary times
live it in society, caught up by socialforces (3).
The social forces of this time included, what could be
referred to as societys repression of women. Seyersted
describes this time period as a society in which a society
where man makes the rules, woman is often kept in a state of
tutelage and regarded as property or as a servant. Seyersted
quotes Chopin herself in saying, As Mme. de Stael's Corinne is
told: Whatever extraordinary gifts she may have, her duty and
her proper destiny is to devote herself to her husband and to
the raising of her children. This type of society had a great
impact on the plot of this story. The reader can better
understand the situation of Mrs. Mallard. Her destiny was that
of devoting herself to her husband. Even though she loved him
and would weep upon seeing him dead, she welcomed the
procession of years that would belong to her absolutely


(Chopin 158). Maureen Anderson refers to Chopin as having an
authorial skill through which she elegantly addresses society's
flaws present in all her works.
Both the point of view and the plot of Story of an
Hour work to create the theme of this story. Theme is a
generalization about the meaning of a story (Charters 1013).
The theme of Chopins story is how ignorant society was at that
time of the true feelings experienced by repressed women.
First, the point of view allows us to see the inner emotions
expressed by Mrs. Mallard. Without a speaker with limited
omniscience, a reader would never realize what was truly being
felt by the protagonist, and the theme would be lost. Because
the narrator is outside the story and could be considered more
objective, the reader is more likely to believe that these
feelings experienced by Mrs. Mallard are true. If Mrs. Mallard
or the sister had told the story, readers would have gotten two
different, biased accounts. The point of view allows a reader
to feel that this really could have happened, an illusion of
life, thereby making the theme more powerful. The plot allows
Mrs. Mallard to explore her feelings of repression and finally
accept the fact that she can rejoice in the freedom of being a
widow (Chopin 158). The surprise ending, the return of Mr.
Mallard and the death of Mrs. Mallard, gives the reader a chance


to understand the ironic beliefs of society (Chopin 158). The
irony can be seen in the totally contradictory feelings of the
protagonist and society. Mrs. Mallard, upon seeing her husband
alive, was suddenly thrown back into a situation in which she
had thought with a shudder that life might be long (Chopin
158). It was this great shock and grief that led to her death,
not the joy that kills (Chopin 158).

Works Cited
Agatucci, Cora. (Professor of English, Humanities Dept.,
Central Oregon Community College). Emergence of the Short
Story: Literary Romanticism and Realism- Poe and Maupassant;
Myth Lit. Theory. In-Class Presentation, English 104:
Introduction to Literature-Fiction, Central Oregon Community
College [Bend, OR]. Fall 2002. Handout.
Anderson, Maureen. Unraveling the Southern Pastoral Tradition:
A New Look at Kate Chopin's At Fault. Southern Literary Journal
34.1: 1-14. Rpt. Ebsco Host Academic Search Elite, 2001; Article
No. 6124416.
Charters, Ann. Appendix 3: The Elements of Fiction. The Story
and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th
Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 1003-1015.


Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour. [First published 1894.]
Rpt. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction.
Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martins, 2003. 157-158.
Katherine Chopin, 1851-1904. [New Entry: 28 Apr. 1998.]
Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000. Rpt. Gale
Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The
Gale Group, 2002.
Maupassant, Guy de. The Writers Goal. [First published
1888.] Rpt. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short
Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th Edition. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 896-898.
O'Brien, Sharon. Bored Wives and Jubilant Widows. The New York
Times 30 Dec. 1990, late. ed., sec. 7: 10. Rpt. Lexis-Nexis. 28
Oct. 2002.
Seyersted, Per. [Excerpt from] Kate Chopin: A Critical
Biography. Louisiana State University Press, 1969. 246. Rpt.
World Literature Criticism Supplement, Vol.1. Gale Literature
Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group,
2002.
2002, Christalyn Grantier

English 1302 - The Short Story: Literary Analysis and Composition.docx 213
Pages in this document may contain hypertext links to websites maintained by public and private organizations. These links are provided only for citation purposes. The author does not control or
guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of the information contained on these web pages. The author does not endorse the organizations sponsoring linked websites and does not
endorse the views they express or the products/services they offer.

Tonya Flowers
Prof. C. Agatucci
Period 1
29 October 2003
Chopins Artistry in The Story of an Hour
To be in conflict with traditional societys beliefs is
difficult for many to do; however, author Kate Chopin fights
that battle to bring readers some of the most thought provoking
literature that a person can get their hands on. Using to her
advantage conventions of narrative stories such as character
development, plot control, and irony, she is able to bring the
reader into a world of emotions that society would scoff at.
Kate Chopin demonstrates her incredible literary talent in The
Story of an Hour by interconnecting the plot and character
development, with her use of thought-provoking vocabulary and
narrative irony.
Kate Chopins literary talent would have never been
so strongly founded if it was not for the circumstances
surrounding her life and upbringing. Her father died when she
was only four years old, which left her mother and grandmother
to raise, and shape her desires and ideologies (Charters 156).
Having been raised primarily by strong willed feminine role
models, Chopin developed a taste for more of an unconventional


role for women in society. In her home town of St. Louis, she
became know as the towns Littlest Rebel (Davis). She was
widowed and left with six children to bring up on her own
(Charters 156). This situation developed more of her strong will
to write about the passion and strength that women have. Much of
her writing portrays women in their relations with men, children
and their own sexuality (Charters 156). Her writing is
classified in the literary movement know as Realism. The
Realism movement took place in the 19th century (Agatucci 4).
Realism is based on everyday events, slice of life stories
that depict ordinary people dealing with society and its forces
on living (Agatucci 3). Realistic writing is characterized with
everyday events, social controversy, and protagonist/antagonist
interactions (Agatucci 3). There is often and ironic undertone
to Realism, as is evident in The Story of an Hour (Agatucci
3). All of the characteristics of the Realism movement mentioned
are active in this story. An example of Realism in The Story
of an Hour is evident when Mrs. Mallards sister reveals to her
the tragic news: It was her sister Josephine who told her, in
broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing
(Chopin 157). This brings out the slice of life quality of
Realism because it is a display of how most people would break
the news of a shocking death. Chopin enjoyed life and believed


that real fiction was and is life (Chopin 861). Although she
felt like a literary outcast, her frankness and honest look at
women and their emotions is what makes The Story of an Hour
and her other works literary jewels in our society today.
Chopin does a great job at integrating two of the
conventions of narrative fiction, plot and character
development. The plot of a story is the sequence of events in a
story and their relation to one another as they develop and
usually resolve a conflict (Charters2 1003). Within the plot
of narrative stories there is an exposition, rise to action,
climax, and a fall from action. The character development is
the other convention that enables Chopin to write this thought
provoking story. Character is what stays with you after you
have finished reading it. The action of the plot is performed by
the characters in the story, the people who make something
happen or produce an effect (Charters2 1006). Chopin uses her
character development to enhance the plot in order to bring the
reader closer to the emotions of the story. In The Story of an
Hour both of these elements are vitally interconnected to each
other.
The plot itself is taking place primarily in the mind of
Mrs. Mallard, which makes imperative that the reader understands
her personality and where thoughts are derived from. First Mrs.


Mallard is described as having heart trouble, and being a tender
woman (Chopin 157). This is important to the plot because it
explains why her sister took great care to break the news to
her. She is also described as being young, with a fair, calm
face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain
strength (Chopin 157). This is a key piece of information in
understanding why she grieves only momentarily. According to
Websters Dictionary repression means: to prevent the natural
or normal expression, activity or development of; a process by
which unacceptable desires or impulses are excluded from
consciousness and left to operate in the unconscious (Webster
527). Mrs. Mallards marriage did not allow her to express
herself through any venue of release with the exception of her
unconscious. She was never allowed to be normal with her
emotions or, to show or use her true strength, but instead had
to suppress them. One can also see that in the plot, Mrs.
Mallard resists the liberation she feels at first because of her
characteristic trait of being weak, and is unable or powerless
to resist them (Chopin 157). As the feeling of freedom sets in
her mind she begins to describe herself as a goddess of
Victory (Chopin 158). A goddess is a female of exceptional
charm beauty, or grace (Webster 294). Mrs. Mallard began, for
the first time in her marriage, to feel beautiful and charming


in light of her victory over the battle of wills that she had
been oppressed by. In the story she gets her first chance to
show off her new found strength and beauty when she lets her
sister in to see the triumph in her eyes (Chopin 158). The
mix of character development and plot is not only evident in the
case of main character, but is also found briefly in the case if
Mr. Mallard. Chopin writes There would be no powerful will
bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women
believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a
fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the
act seem no less a crime (Chopin 158). This is the only
glimpse that the reader gets into Bentley Mallards character;
however there is much revealed through this passage. He was
controlling, forcing his will on her. He was powerful (in
contrast to her being powerless) and blind to the fact that he
was hurting his wife. The other minor characters are left to the
imagination of the reader because they do not play major roles
within the plot.
A fundamental characteristic of Realism is its use of
irony. Chopin plays with irony to bring surprise to the climax,
as well as enhance the depth of the story. Sara Davis has this
to say: The Story of an Hour turns on a series of artful
modulated ironies that culminate in a somewhat contrived ending


(Davis). There are several examples of this, first off that of
Brentleys friend Richard takes the time to confirm his name
with a second telegram, and then at the end of the story it
turns out that he is not even involved in the accident (Chopin
157). Another example of irony is this: Her pulse beat fast,
and then the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her
body (Chopin 158). In this sentence it is ironic that it was
blood, the symbolic representation of life, that was fueling
her, and then at the end her life ceases. Another ironic point
is made within Mrs. Mallards thought process: She breathed a
quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she
had thought with a shudder that life might be long (Chopin
158).Her prayer was answered, and when she found out she
immediately had a fatal heart attack. In addition to this irony
of life and death, the reader is faced with yet another and
maybe the strongest use of irony in this short story, and that
is the use of the word joy. It is first used in Mrs. Mallards
thoughts as a monstrous joy of being free from bondage, and
tasting the elixir of life that is now so precious to her
(Chopin 158). Secondly it is used by the doctors in the last
line who naively state that she died of heart diseaseof joy
that kills (Chopin 158). It is ironic that it was not joy of
seeing Mr. Mallard alive that killed her, but that of the


terrible loss that she would never feel the monstrous joy she
had felt before. Kate Chopin did produce an excellent example of
Realism literature with her use of irony in this story.
Chopin does not allow her use of irony as her only tool to
enhance the dynamics of The Story of an Hour. She also
incorporates a variety of tools such as metaphors, narrative
style, and thought provoking vocabulary that bring this story to
life. Mrs. Mallard is described as having heart trouble (Chopin
157). One could argue that her heart trouble was not that of a
physical condition, but of an emotional and psychological
condition derived from such a difficult marriage. Chopin also
uses a wide array of descriptive words to bring to life the
feelings that Mrs. Mallard is having about the death of her
husband. Examples of this are seen throughout the text: new
spring life delicious breath of air blue sky showing through
the clouds drinking in a very elixir of life summer days
etc. (Chopin 157-158). Chopin also uses the metaphor of an open
window that she sits Mrs. Mallard in front of during the rise of
the plot. The window is not just part of the setting, but a
window into the heart and mind of the main character. It was her
access to new life, new excitement, and new hopes of the coming
years without Brentlys overpowering will on her. Jennifer Hicks
brings out another point of narrative eloquence by stating that


Chopin elaborates upon this when the narrator says that Mrs.
Mallard would have no one follow her. While the implication is
that she would have no one follow her to her room, the reader
wonders in hindsight whether Mrs. Mallard might have meant also
that she would have no one interfere with her new life again
(Hicks). Kate Chopin used all of these tools to her advantage to
bring the world a controversial look at a womans emotions.
It took many years after this story was written for its
popularity to grow into what it is today. In The Story of an
Hour Kate Chopin interconnects the plot, characters, irony, and
narrative eloquence to produce a literary product that is
arguably priceless in our society today. Fred Lewis Patte says
in A History of American Literature that since 1870 the
strength of Chopins work come from what may be described as a
native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius
(Hicks). Readers of the future look forward to see if her
genius in this work will stand the test of time.

Works Cited
Agatucci, Cora. Emergence of the Short Story. Printed
10/14/03.
<http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/shortstory.htm>.


Charters, Ann. Kate Chopin. [header note]. The Story and its
Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed Ann Charters.
Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford, St. Martins, 2003. 156.
Charters, Ann. The Elements of Fiction. The Story and its
Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed Ann Charters.
Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford, St. Martins, 2003. 1003-1015.
Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour. [First published 1894]
Rpt. The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction.
Ed Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford, St. Martins,
2003. 157-158.
Chopin, Kate. How I stumbled upon Maupassant. [1896]. Rpt. The
Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed Ann
Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford, St. Martins, 2003.
861-862.
Davis, Sara de Saussure. Kate Chopin, February 8, 1851-August
22, 1904. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 12: American
Realist and Naturalist. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Ed. Donald
Pizer and Earl N. Harbert. Detroit: Gale, 1982. 59-71 Rpt. Gale
Literature Resource Center [online subscription database]. The
Gale Group, 2002.
Hicks, Jennifer. An Overview of The Story of an Hour'. Short
Stories for Students. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Rpt. Gale


Literature Resource Center [online subscription database]. The
Gale Group, 2002.
Webster. Websters Dictionary and Thesaurus Deluxe Edition.
Nichols Publishing Group 2001. Imprinted of Allied Publishing
Group, Inc. 294, 527


XI. Literary Analysis & Criticism



Approaches to Literary Criticism

Biographical: The author's life affects his or her work
Central Biographical Questions:
What biographical facts has the author used in the text?
What biographical facts has the author changed? Why?
What insights do we acquire about the authors life by reading the text?
How do these facts and insights increase (or diminish) our understanding of the text?
In what ways does the author seem to consider his or her own life as "typical" or significant?
Historical: Historical events help shape a work
Central Historical Questions:
What specific historical events were happening when the work was being composed? (See timelines in
history or literature texts.)
What historical events does the work deal with?
In what ways did history affect the writer's outlook?
In what ways did history affect the style? language? content?
In what ways and for what reasons did the writer alter historical events?
Geographical: Settings limit and define what writers can produce Central Geographical Questions:
Which geographical features in the text are actual?
What aspects of the geography are essential to the story? And which are nonessential?
To what extent has the geography limited the kind of story that can happen?
In what ways has the writer altered the geography to suit his or her purposes? Has the writer made
any geographical errors?
Political: Prevailing Political conditions often modify a literary work


Central Political Questions:
What political events are significant in the text?
What political events were occurring at the time the text was written? (See timelines in history or
literature texts.)
What political events were occurring at the time the text was written?
What political beliefs does the author seem to have? And how are those beliefs shown?
What political beliefs does the author seem to dislike? How can you tell?
Philosophical and Religious: The religious and ethical climate influences writers and their texts.
Central Philosophical/Religious Questions:
What religious or ethical beliefs does the text deal with directly? Are any religions or philosophies
mentioned specifically in the text?
What religious or ethical beliefs or philosophies does the author seem to favor? How can you tell?
What religious or ethical beliefs or philosophies does the author seem to disfavor? How can you tell?
What behaviors do the characters display that the author wants us to think are right? How can you
tell?
What behavior is wrong? How can you tell?
Sociological/Anthropological: Social conditions and notions of the origins and cultures of humanity
affect literature.
Central Sociological/Anthropological Questions:
What sort of society does the author describe? (How is it set up? What rules are there? What
happens to people who break them? Who enforces the rules?)
What does the writer seem to like or dislike about this society?
What changes do you think the writer would like to make in the society? And how can you tell?


What sorts of pressures does the society put on its members? How do the members respond to this
pressure?
Psychological: Prevailing theories of human behavior find their way into literature.

Central Psychological Questions:
Are there any specific psychologists or psychological theories mentioned in the text? In what ways?
What theories of human behavior does the writer seem to believe? How can you tell?
What theories of human behavior does the writer seem to reject? How can you tell?
How do peoples minds work in the text? How do people think? How are their thoughts shown?
In what ways do the structure and organization of the text indicate the writers beliefs about the
workings of the mind?



XIII. Introduction to Modern Literary
Theory
Adapted from: http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm

Literary Trends and Influences*

* Disclaimer: When theories are explained briefly, a necessary reduction in their complexity and richness occurs. The
information below is meant merely as a guide or introduction to modern literary theories and trends.

Critical/Theoretical Approaches:

New Criticism
Archetypal/Myth Criticism
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Marxism
Postcolonialism
Existentialism
Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics
Russian Formalism/Prague Linguistic Circle/Linguistic Criticism/Dialogism
Avant-Garde/Surrealism/Dadaism
Structuralism and Semiotics
Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
Postmodernism
New Historicism
Reception and Reader-Response Theory
Feminism
Genre Criticism
Autobiographical Theory
Travel Theory
Links to Other General Literary Theory Websites
General Resources - Bibliography of Critical Theory Texts
New Criticism
A literary movement that started in the late 1920s and 1930s and originated in reaction to traditional criticism that new
critics saw as largely concerned with matters extraneous to the text, e.g., with the biography or psychology of the author
or the work's relationship to literary history. New Criticism proposed that a work of literary art should be regarded as
autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself. A poem consists less of a series
of referential and verifiable statements about the 'real' world beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated
organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form (Hawkes, pp. 150-151). Major figures of New Criticism
include I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, David Daiches, William Empson, Murray Krieger, John Crowe
Ransom, Allen Tate, F. R. Leavis, Robert Penn Warren, W. K. Wimsatt, R. P. Blackmur, Rene Wellek, Ausin Warren,
and Ivor Winters.


Key Terms:

Intentional Fallacy - equating the meaning of a poem with the author's intentions.

Affective Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a text with how it makes the reader feel. A reader's emotional response to a
text generally does not produce a reliable interpretation.

Heresy of Paraphrase - assuming that an interpretation of a literary work could consist of a detailed summary or
paraphrase.

Close reading (from Bressler - see General Resources below) - "a close and detailed analysis of the text itself to arrive at
an interpretation without referring to historical, authorial, or cultural concerns" (263).

Further references:

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren, eds. Understanding Poetry. New York: Holt, 1938.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York, 1955.
Lentriccia, Frank. After the New Criticism. See chapter 6.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. See chapter 1.
Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A
Comparative Introduction. See chapter 3.
Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1941.
Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism. London: Routledge & Paul, 1964.
Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954.
Winters, Ivor. In Defense of Reason. Denver: Swallow P, 1947.
See also the works of Robert D. Denham, John Fekete, and William J. Kennedy.
Suggested Websites:

"New Criticism Explained" by Dr. Warren Hedges (Southern Oregon University)
"Definition of the New Criticism" - virtuaLit (Beford-St. Martin's Resource)

Archetypal / Myth Criticism

A form of criticism based largely on the works of C. G. Jung (YOONG) and Joseph Campbell (and myth itself). Some
of the school's major figures include Robert Graves, Francis Fergusson, Philip Wheelwright, Leslie Fiedler, Northrop
Frye, Maud Bodkin, and G. Wilson Knight. These critics view the genres and individual plot patterns of literature,
including highly sophisticated and realistic works, as recurrences of certain archetypes and essential mythic formulae.
Archetypes, according to Jung, are "primordial images"; the "psychic residue" of repeated types of experience in the lives
of very ancient ancestors which are inherited in the "collective unconscious" of the human race and are expressed in
myths, religion, dreams, and private fantasies, as well as in the works of literature (Abrams, p. 10, 112). Some common
examples of archetypes include water, sun, moon, colors, circles, the Great Mother, Wise Old Man, etc. In terms of
archetypal criticism, the color white might be associated with innocence or could signify death or the supernatural.

Key Terms:

Anima - feminine aspect - the inner feminine part of the male personality or a man's image of a woman.

Animus - male aspect - an inner masculine part of the female personality or a woman's image of a man.

Archetype - (from Makaryk - see General Resources below) - "a typical or recurring image, character, narrative design,
theme, or other literary phenomenon that has been in literature from the beginning and regularly reappears" (508). Note


- Frye sees archetypes as recurring patterns in literature; in contrast, Jung views archetypes as primal, ancient
images/experience that we have inherited.

Collective Unconscious - "a set of primal memories common to the human race, existing below each person's conscious
mind" (Jung)

Persona - the image we present to the world

Shadow - darker, sometimes hidden (deliberately or unconsciously), elements of a person's psyche

Further references:

Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: OUP, 1934.
Campbell, Joseph. Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Boos, 1949.
Frazer, J. G.The Golden Bough.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism and Fables of Identity.
Graves, Robert. Greek Myths and The White Goddess.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature and various other works
Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy.
Lentriccia, Frank. After the New Criticism. See chapter 1.
Pratt, Anais. Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
Seboek, Thomas A., ed. Myth: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955.
See also the works of Derek Brewer, Shirley Lowry, June Singer, and Laurens Van der Post
Suggested Websites:

"Archetypal Criticism" from the Literary Encyclopedia
"Mythological and Archetypal Approaches" (from Guerin et al - see General Resources below)
Johns Hopkins' Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism: Archetypal Theory and Criticism
"Carl Jung" - Wikipedia
"Handout on Carl Gustav Jung" - Dr. Victor Daniels (Psychology Dept. - Sonoma University)

Psychoanalytic Criticism

The application of specific psychological principles (particularly those of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan [zhawk
lawk-KAWN]) to the study of literature. Psychoanalytic criticism may focus on the writer's psyche, the study of the
creative process, the study of psychological types and principles present within works of literature, or the effects of
literature upon its readers (Wellek and Warren, p. 81). In addition to Freud and Lacan, major figures include Shoshona
Felman, Jane Gallop, Norman Holland, George Klein, Elizabeth Wright, Frederick Hoffman, and, Simon Lesser.

Key Terms:

Unconscious - the irrational part of the psyche unavailable to a person's consciousness except through dissociated acts
or dreams.

Freud's model of the psyche:

Id - completely unconscious part of the psyche that serves as a storehouse of our desires, wishes, and fears. The id
houses the libido, the source of psychosexual energy.
Ego - mostly to partially (<--a point of debate) conscious part of the psyche that processes experiences and operates as a
referee or mediator between the id and superego.
Superego - often thought of as one's "conscience"; the superego operates "like an internal censor [encouraging] moral
judgments in light of social pressures" (123, Bressler - see General Resources below).


Lacan's model of the psyche:

Imaginary - a preverbal/verbal stage in which a child (around 6-18 months of age) begins to develop a sense of
separateness from her mother as well as other people and objects; however, the child's sense of sense is still incomplete.
Symbolic - the stage marking a child's entrance into language (the ability to understand and generate symbols); in
contrast to the imaginary stage, largely focused on the mother, the symbolic stage shifts attention to the father who, in
Lacanian theory, represents cultural norms, laws, language, and power (the symbol of power is the phallus--an arguably
"gender-neutral" term).
Real - an unattainable stage representing all that a person is not and does not have. Both Lacan and his critics argue
whether the real order represents the period before the imaginary order when a child is completely fulfilled--without
need or lack, or if the real order follows the symbolic order and represents our "perennial lack" (because we cannot
return to the state of wholeness that existed before language).
Further references:

Elliott, Anthony. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. See chapter 5.
Ellmann, Maud, ed. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. London: Longman, 1994.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams.
Gay, Peter, ed.The Freud Reader. London: Vintage, 1995.
Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. See Chapter 5.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection.
Sarup, Madan. Jacques Lacan. London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf, 1992.
Weber, Samuel. The Legend of Freud.
See also the works of Harold Bloom, Shoshona Felman, Juliet Mitchell, Geoffrey Hartman, and Stuart Schniederman.
Suggested Websites:

"Definition of Psychoanalytic Criticism" from virtuaLit (Bedford-St.Martin's resource)
"Freudian, Lacanian and Object Relations Theory" - Timothy R. Quigley
"Introduction to Psychoanalysis" by Dr. Dino Felluga
"The Mind and the Book: A Long Look at Psychoanalytic Criticism" by Norman N. Holland
"Psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud" by Dr. Mary Klages (University of Colorado at Boulder)
"Jacques Lacan" by Dr. Mary Klages (University of Colorado at Boulder)

Marxism

A sociological approach to literature that viewed works of literature or art as the products of historical forces that can be
analyzed by looking at the material conditions in which they were formed. In Marxist ideology, what we often classify as
a world view (such as the Victorian age) is actually the articulations of the dominant class. Marxism generally focuses on
the clash between the dominant and repressed classes in any given age and also may encourage art to imitate what is
often termed an "objective" reality. Contemporary Marxism is much broader in its focus, and views art as simultaneously
reflective and autonomous to the age in which it was produced. The Frankfurt School is also associated with Marxism
(Abrams, p. 178, Childers and Hentzi, pp. 175-179). Major figures include Karl Marx, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson,
Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser (ALT-whos-sair), Walter Benjamin (ben-yeh-MEEN), Antonio Gramsci (GRAWM-
shee), Georg Lukacs (lou-KOTCH), and Friedrich Engels, Theordor Adorno (a-DOR-no), Edward Ahern, Gilles
Deleuze (DAY-looz) and Felix Guattari (GUAT-eh-ree).

Key Terms (note: definitions below taken from Ann B. Dobie's text, Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary
Criticism - see General Resources below):

Commodificaion - "the attitude of valuing things not for their utility but for their power to impress others or for their
resale possibilities" (92).


Conspicuous consumption - "the obvious acquisition of things only for their sign value and/or exchange value" (92).

Dialectical materialism - "the theory that history develops neither in a random fashion nor in a linear one but instead as
struggle between contradictions that ultimately find resolution in a synthesis of the two sides. For example, class
conflicts lead to new social systems" (92).

Material circumstances - "the economic conditions underlying the society. To understand social events, one must have a
grasp of the material circumstances and the historical situation in which they occur" (92).

Reflectionism - associated with Vulgar Marxism - "a theory that the superstructure of a society mirrors its economic base
and, by extension, that a text reflects the society that produced it" (92).

Superstructure - "The social, political, and ideological systems and institutions--for example, the values, art, and legal
processes of a society--that are generated by the base" (92).

Further references:

Cathouse, Louis. Lenin and Ideology. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971.
Cary, Nelson, and Lawrence Gross berg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Bullock, Chris and David Peck. Guide to Marxist Criticism.
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. New York: Schocken, 1978.
Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality. Berkeley: U of California P, 1935.
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: PUP, 1971.
Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. See chapter 6.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1977.
See also the works of Walter Benjamin, Tony Bennett, Terry Eagleton, John Frow, Georg Lukacs, Pierre Macherey,
Michael Ryan, and Ronald Taylor.

Suggested Websites:

"Definition of Marxist Criticism" - virtuaLit (Bedford-St. Martin's resource)
"Marxism" - Wikipedia Encyclopedia
Marxist Theory and Criticism - from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism
"Marxism and Ideology" by Dr. Mary Klages - University of Colorado at Boulder

Postcolonialism
Literally, postcolonialism refers to the period following the decline of colonialism, e.g., the end or lessening of
domination by European empires. Although the term postcolonialism generally refers to the period after colonialism, the
distinction is not always made. In its use as a critical approach, postcolonialism refers to "a collection of theoretical and
critical strategies used to examine the culture (literature, politics, history, and so forth) of former colonies of the
European empires, and their relation to the rest of the world" (Makaryk 155 - see General Resources below). Among the
many challenges facing postcolonial writers are the attempt both to resurrect their culture and to combat preconceptions
about their culture. Edward Said, for example, uses the word Orientalism to describe the discourse about the East
constructed by the West. Major figures include Edward Said (sah-EED), Homi Bhabha (bah-bah), Frantz Fanon (fah-
NAWN), Gayatri Spivak, Chinua Achebe (ah-CHAY-bay) , Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, and Buchi
Emecheta.

Key Terms:

Alterity - "lack of identification with some part of one's personality or one's community, differentness, otherness"


Diaspora (dI-ASP-er-ah- "is used (without capitalization) to refer to any people or ethnic population forced or induced
to leave their traditional ethnic homelands, being dispersed throughout other parts of the world, and the ensuing
developments in their dispersal and culture" (Wikipedia).

Eurocentrism - "the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European (and, generally, Western)
concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. It is an instance of ethnocentrism, perhaps
especially relevant because of its alignment with current and past real power structures in the world"
(Dictionary.LaborLawTalk.com)

Hybridity - "an important concept in post-colonial theory, referring to the integration (or, mingling) of cultural signs and
practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures ("integration" may be too orderly a word to represent the
variety of stratagems, desperate or cunning or good-willed, by which people adapt themselves to the necessities and the
opportunities of more or less oppressive or invasive cultural impositions, live into alien cultural patterns through their
own structures of understanding, thus producing something familiar but new). The assimilation and adaptation of
cultural practices, the cross-fertilization of cultures, can be seen as positive, enriching, and dynamic, as well as as
oppressive" (from Dr. John Lye - see General Literary Theory Websites below).

Imperialism - "the policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or
maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial control or through indirect methods of exerting control on the
politics and/or economy of other countries. The term is used by some to describe the policy of a country in maintaining
colonies and dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the country calls itself an empire"
(Dictionary.LaborLawTalk.com).

Further references:

Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Helen. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
Ashcroft, Bill. Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
Guneratne, Anthony R. The Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others.
Harding, Sandra and Uma Narayan, ed. Border Crossings: Multicultural and Postcolonial Feminist Challenges to
Philosophy 2. Indiana University Press, 1998.
Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin. White Masks. Trans. by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto, 1986.
Said, Edward. Orientalism.
Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge, 1988.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Trinh, T. Minh-Ha, Woman. Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989.
See writings of Jamaica Kincaid, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, R. K. Narayan, Yasunari Kawabata, Anita Desai,
Frantz Fanon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chinea Acheve, J.M. Coetzee, Anthol Fugard, Kamala Das, Tsitsi Dangarembga, etc.
Suggested Websites:

"Post-Colonialism" - Wikipedia Encyclopedia
"Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory" by Dr. John Lye (Brock University)
"Introduction to Postcolonial Studies" by Dr. Deepika Bahri (Emory University)
"Postcolonialism" - handout by Dr. Aaron Kelly - University of Edinburgh

Existentialism
Existentialism is a philosophy (promoted especially by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus) that views each person as an
isolated being who is cast into an alien universe, and conceives the world as possessing no inherent human truth, value,
or meaning. A person's life, then, as it moves from the nothingness from which it came toward the nothingness where it
must end, defines an existence which is both anguished and absurd (Guerin). In a world without sense, all choices are


possible, a situation which Sartre viewed as human beings central dilemma: "Man [woman] is condemned to be free." In
contrast to atheist existentialism, Sren Kierkegaard theorized that belief in God (given that we are provided with no
proof or assurance) required a conscious choice or "leap of faith." The major figures include Sren Kierkegaard,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre (sart or SAR-treh), Albert Camus (kah-MUE or ka-MOO) ,
Simone de Beauvoir (bohv-WAHR) , Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers (YASS-pers), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (mer-LOH
pawn-TEE).

Key Terms:

Absurd - a term used to describe existence--a world without inherent meaning or truth.

Authenticity - to make choices based on an individual code of ethics (commitment) rather than because of societal
pressures. A choice made just because "it's what people do" would be considered inauthentic.

"Leap of faith" - although Kierkegaard acknowledged that religion was inherently unknowable and filled with risks, faith
required an act of commitment (the "leap of faith"); the commitment to Christianity would also lessen the despair of an
absurd world.

Further references:

Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger.
Cooper, D. Existentialism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
Hannay, A. Kierkegaard, London: Routledge, 1982.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
Kierkegaard, Sren. Fear and Trembling.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. See chapter 3.
Marcel, G. The Philosophy of Existentialism, New York: Citadel Press, 1968.
Moran, R. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Nietzsche, Fredrich. Beyond Good and Evil.
Ricoeur, P. Oneself as Another. Tr. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism and Being and Nothingness.
Taylor, C. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Suggested Websites:

"Existentialism" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Existentialism" - Dictionary of the History or Ideas (University of Virginia)
"Existentialism" - Wikipedia
"The Ethics of Absolute Freedom" by Dr. David Banach
"Jean-Paul Sartre: The Humanism of Existentialism" by Dr. Bob Zunjic (University of Rhode Island)
"Fredrich Nietzsche" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a philosophical method, first developed by Edmund Husserl (HUHSS-erel), that proposed
"phenomenological reduction" so that everything not "immanent" to consciousness must be excluded; all realities must
be treated as pure "phenomena" and this is the only absolute data from which we can begin. Husserl viewed
consciousness always as intentional and that the act of consciousness, the thinking subject and the object it "intends,"
are inseparable. Art is not a means of securing pleasure, but a revelation of being. The work is the phenomenon by
which we come to know the world (Eagleton, p. 54; Abrams, p. 133, Guerin, p. 263).

Hermeneutics


Hermeneutics sees interpretation as a circular process whereby valid interpretation can be achieved by a sustained,
mutually qualifying interplay between our progressive sense of the whole and our retrospective understanding of its
component parts. Two dominant theories that emerged from Wilhelm Dilthey's original premise were that of E. D.
Hirsch who, in accord with Dilthey, felt a valid interpretation was possible by uncovering the work's authorial intent
(though informed by historical and cultural determinants), and in contrast, that of Martin Heidegger (HIGH-deg-er) who
argued that a reader must experience the "inner life" of a text in order to understand it at all. The reader's "being-in-the-
world" or dasein is fraught with difficulties since both the reader and the text exist in a temporal and fluid state. For
Heidegger or Hans Georg Gadamer (GAH-de-mer), then, a valid interpretation may become irrecoverable and will
always be relative.

Key Terms:

Dasein - simply, "being there," or "being-in-the world" - Heidegger argued that "what is distinctive about human
existence is its Dasein ('givenness'): our consciousness both projects the things of the world and at the same time is
subjected to the world by the very nature of existence in the world" (Selden and Widdowson 52 - see General Resources
below).

Intentionality - "is at the heart of knowing. We live in meaning, and we live 'towards,' oriented to experience.
Consequently there is an intentional structure in textuality and expression, in self-knowledge and in knowledge of others.
This intentionality is also a distance: consciousness is not identical with its objects, but is intended consciousness"
(quoted from Dr. John Lye's website - see suggested resources below).

Phenomenological Reduction - a concept most frequently associated with Edmund Husserl; as explained by Terry
Eagleton (see General Resources below) "To establish certainty, then, we must first of all ignore, or 'put in brackets,'
anything which is beyond our immediate experience: we must reduce the external world to the contents of our
consciousness alone....Everything not 'immanent' to consciousness must be rigorously excluded: all realities must be
treated as pure 'phenomena,' in terms of their appearances in our mind, and this is the only absolute data from which we
can begin" (55).

Further references:

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature.
Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad, 1982.
Habermas, Jrgen (JUR-gen HAH-bur-mahs). Communication and the Evolution of Society.
Halliburton, David. Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Hirsch, E.D. The Aims of Interpretation.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.
Magliola, Robert R. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
Palmer, Richard. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schliermacher.
Ricouer, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics.
Suggested Websites:

"Phenomenology" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Phenomenology Online - page developed by Max van Manen
"Phenomenology" - Wikipedia
"Phenomenology: Bracketing Experience" - by Garth Kemerling (Philosophy Pages)
"Some Principles of Phenomenological Hermeneutics" by Dr. John Lye (Brock University)


Russian Formalism / Prague Linguistic Circle/Linguistic
Criticism/Dialogic Theory

These linguistic movements began in the 1920s, were suppressed by the Soviets in the 1930s, moved to Czechoslovakia
and were continued by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle (including Roman Jakobson (YAH-keb-sen), Jan
Mukarovsky, and Ren Wellek). The Prague Linguistic Circle viewed literature as a special class of language, and rested
on the assumption that there is a fundamental opposition between literary (or poetical) language and ordinary language.
Formalism views the primary function of ordinary language as communicating a message, or information, by references
to the world existing outside of language. In contrast, it views literary language as self-focused: its function is not to
make extrinsic references, but to draw attention to its own "formal" features--that is, to interrelationships among the
linguistic signs themselves. Literature is held to be subject to critical analysis by the sciences of linguistics but also by a
type of linguistics different from that adapted to ordinary discourse, because its laws produce the distinctive features of
literariness (Abrams, pp. 165-166). An important contribution made by Victor Schklovsky (of the Leningrad group) was
to explain how language--through a period of time--tends to become "smooth, unconscious or transparent." In contrast,
the work of literature is to defamiliarize language by a process of "making strange." Dialogism refers to a theory, initiated
by Mikhail Bakhtin (bahk-TEEN), arguing that in a dialogic work of literature--such as in the writings of Dostoevsky--
there is a "polyphonic interplay of various characters' voices ... where no worldview is given superiority over others;
neither is that voice which may be identified with the author's necessarily the most engaging or persuasive of all those in
the text" (Childers & Hentzi, p. 81).

Key Terms:

Carnival - "For Bakhtin, carnival reflected the 'lived life' of medieval and early modern peoples. In carnival, official
authority and high culture were jostled 'from below' by elements of satire, parody, irony, mimicry, bodily humor, and
grotesque display. This jostling from below served to keep society open, to liberate it from deadening..." (Bressler 276 -
see General Resources below).

Heteroglossia - "refers, first, to the way in which every instance of language use - every utterance - is embedded in a
specific set of social circumstances, and second, to the way the meaning of each particular utterance is shaped and
influenced by the many-layered context in which it occurs" (Sarah Willen, "Dialogism and Heteroglossia")

Monologism - "having one single voice, or representing one single ideological stance or perspective, often used in
opposition to the Bakhtinian dialogical. In a monological form, all the characters' voices are subordinated to the voice of
the author" (Malcolm Hayward).

Polyphony - "a term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe a dialogical text which, unlike a monological text, does not
depend on the centrality of a single authoritative voice. Such a text incorporates a rich plurality and multiplicity of voices,
styles, and points of view. It comprises, in Bakhtin's phrase, "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and
consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices" (Henderson and Brown - Glossary of Literary Theory).

Further references:

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics.
Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London, 1979.
Ehrlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine.
Garvin, Paul L. (trans.) A Prague School Reader. Washington DC: Georgetown Academic P, 1973.
Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990.
Jakobson, Roman. "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics." Ed. Sebeok, Thomas. Style in Language, pp. 350-377.
Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. See chapters 1 and 2.
Lemon, Lee T. and Marion J. Reese. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays.
Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990.


Medvedev, P.N. and Mikhail Bakhtin. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to
Sociological Poetics.
Mukarovsky, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Trans. M. E. Suino. Ann Arbor: Michigan State
UP, 1979.
Thompson, E.M. Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism.
Wellek, Ren. The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School.
Suggested Websites:

Prague Linguistic Circle - Dr. John Gohol
"Mikhail Bakhtin" by Dr. Mary Klages - University of Colorado at Boulder
"Russian Formalism" - Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
The Bakhtin Circle - by Dr. Craig Brandist - The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Russian Formalism - Dr. John Gohol
Dialogism: An International Journal of Bakhtin Studies - The Bakhtin Centre - University of Sheffield

Avant-Garde / Surrealism / Dadaism

Avant-Garde literally meant the "most forwardly placed troops." The movement sought to eliminate or at least blur the
distinction between art and life often by introducing elements of mass culture. These artists aimed to "make it new" and
often represented themselves as alienated from the established order. Avant-garde literature and art challenged societal
norms to "shock" the sensibilities of its audience (Childers & Hentzi, p.26 and Abrams, p.110).

Surrealism (also associated with the avant-garde and dadaism) was initiated in particular by Andr Breton, whose 1924
"Manifesto of Surrealism" defined the movement's "adherence to the imagination, dreams, the fantastic, and the
irrational." Dada is a nonsense word and the movement, in many ways similar to the trends of avant-garde and
surrealism, "emphasized absurdity, reflected a spirit of nihilism, and celebrated the function of chance" (Childers &
Hentzi, p. 69). Major figures include Andr Breton (breh-TAWN), Georges Bataille (beh-TYE), Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp,
Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp (dew-SHAHN), Man Ray, Raoul Hausmann, Max Ernst and
Kurt Schwitters.

Further references:

Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Edited, translated, and introduced by Michael
Richardson. London, New York: Verso, c1994
Brger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Butler, Christopher. After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde.
Calinescu, Matei. Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch.
Carrouges, Michel. Andre Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism. Trans. Maura Prendergast. University of
Alabama Press, 1974.
Matthews, J. H. Toward the Poetics of Surrealism.
Short, Robert. Dada and Surrealism.
Suggested Websites:

Avant-Garde and Kitsch - Clement Greenberg (1939 article from Partisan Review)
Surrealism - Wikipedia
Dada - Wikipedia
Surrealism - Dr. David Cunningham, The Literary Encyclopedia

Structuralism and Semiotics


Structuralism
Structuralism is a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perceptions and
description of structures. At its simplest, structuralism claims that the nature of every element in any given situation has
no significance by itself, and in fact is determined by all the other elements involved in that situation. The full
significance of any entity cannot be perceived unless and until it is integrated into the structure of which it forms a part
(Hawkes, p. 11). Structuralists believe that all human activity is constructed, not natural or "essential." Consequently, it is
the systems of organization that are important (what we do is always a matter of selection within a given construct). By
this formulation, "any activity, from the actions of a narrative to not eating one's peas with a knife, takes place within a
system of differences and has meaning only in its relation to other possible activities within that system, not to some
meaning that emanates from nature or the divine" (Childers & Hentzi, p. 286.). Major figures include Claude Lvi-
Strauss (LAY-vee-strows), A. J. Greimas (GREE-mahs), Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (bart), Ferdinand de Saussure
(soh-SURR or soh-ZHOR), Roman Jakobson (YAH-keb-sen), Vladimir Propp, and Terence Hawkes.

Semiology
Semiotics, simply put, is the science of signs. Semiology proposes that a great diversity of our human action and
productions--our bodily postures and gestures, the the social rituals we perform, the clothes we wear, the meals we serve,
the buildings we inhabit--all convey "shared" meanings to members of a particular culture, and so can be analyzed as
signs which function in diverse kinds of signifying systems. Linguistics (the study of verbal signs and structures) is only
one branch of semiotics but supplies the basic methods and terms which are used in the study of all other social sign
systems (Abrams, p. 170). Major figures include Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault (fou-KOH),
Umberto Eco, Grard Genette, and Roland Barthes (bart).

Key Terms (much of this is adapted from Charles Bressler's Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice -
see General Resources below):

Binary Opposition - "pairs of mutually-exclusive signifiers in a paradigm set representing categories which are logically
opposed and which together define a complete universe of discourse (relevant ontological domain), e.g. alive/not-alive.
In such oppositions each term necessarily implies its opposite and there is no middle term" (Daniel Chandler).

Mythemes - a term developed by Claude Lvi-Strauss--mythemes are the smallest component parts of a myth. By
breaking up myths into mythemes, those structures (mythemes) may be studied chronologically (~ diacrhonically) or
synchronically/relationally.

Sign vs. Symbol - According to Saussure, "words are not symbols which correspond to referents, but rather are 'signs'
which are made up of two parts (like two sides of a sheet of paper): a mark,either written or spoken, called a 'signifier,'
and a concept (what is 'thought' when the mark is made), called a 'signified'" (Selden and Widdowson 104 - see General
Resources below). The distinction is important because Saussure contended that the relationship between signifier and
signified is arbitrary; the only way we can distinguish meaning is by difference (one sign or word differs from another).

The relational nature of language implied by Saussure's system rejects the concept that a word/symbol corresponds to
an outside object/referent. Instead, meaning--the interpretation of a sign--can exist only in relationship with other signs.
Selden and Widdowson use the sign system of traffic lights as an example. The color red, in that system, signifies "stop,"
even though "there is no natural bond between red and stop" (105). Meaning is derived entirely through difference, "a
system of opposites and contrasts," e.g., referring back to the traffic lights' example, red's meaning depends on the fact
that it is not green and not amber (105).

Structuralist narratology - "a form of structuralism espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, and
Gerard Genette that illustrates how a story's meaning develops from its overall structure (its langue) rather than from
each individual story's isolated theme. To ascertain a text's meaning, narratologists emphasize grammatical elements such
as verb tenses and the relationships and configurations of figures of speech within the story" (Bressler 275 - see General
Resources below).

Further references:

Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. R. Howard. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972


---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
---. The Pleasure of the Text.
Caws, Peter. "What is Structuralism?" Partisan Review. Vol. 35, No. 1, Winter 1968, pp. 75-91.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. New York: Cornell UP,
1973.
Eco, Umberto. Theory of Semiotics.
Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. See chapter 4.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language and Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. See chapter 4.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked.1964. Trans. John and Doreen Weighman. New York: Harper, 1975.
---. Structural Anthropology. Trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoeph. London: Allen Lane, 1968.
Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry
Peirce, Charles. Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce.
Propp, Vladimir.The Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. Trans. Laurence Scott. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968.
(de) Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. W. Baskin. London: Fontana/Collins, 1974.
Scholes, Robert. Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics.
Sebeok, Thomas. The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1977.
Suggested Websites:

"Elements of Structuralism" - Dr. John Lye (Brock University)
Structuralism - Wikipedia
Structuralism - John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
"Structuralism/Poststructuralism" - Dr. Mary Klages (University of Colorado at Boulder)
"Definition of Structuralism" - virtuaLit
"Semiotics for Beginners" - Dr. David Chandler (University of Wales)
Semiotics - Wikipedia
Semiotics - Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
Post-Structuralism (which is often used synonymously with Deconstruction or Postmodernism) is a reaction to
structuralism and works against seeing language as a stable, closed system. It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as
a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing literature as irreducibly
plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single center, essence, or meaning .
Jacques Derrida's (dair-ree-DAH) paper on "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
(delivered in 1966) proved particularly influential in the creation of post-structuralism. Derrida argued against, in essence,
the notion of a knowable center (the Western ideal of logocentrism), a structure that could organize the differential play
of language or thought but somehow remain immune to the same "play" it depicts (Abrams, 258-9). Derrida's critique of
structuralism also heralded the advent of deconstruction that--like post-structuralism--critiques the notion of "origin"
built into structuralism. In negative terms, deconstruction--particularly as articulated by Derrida--has often come to be
interpreted as "anything goes" since nothing has any real meaning or truth. More positively, it may posited that Derrida,
like Paul de Man (de-MAHN) and other post-structuralists, really asks for rigor, that is, a type of interpretation that is
constantly and ruthlessly self-conscious and on guard. Similarly, Christopher Norris (in "What's Wrong with
Postmodernism?") launches a cogent argument against simplistic attacks of Derrida's theories:

On this question [the tendency of critics to read deconstruction "as a species of all-licensing sophistical 'freeplay'"), as on
so many others, the issue has been obscured by a failure to grasp Derrida's point when he identifies those problematic
factors in language (catachreses, slippages between 'literal' and 'figural' sense, subliminal metaphors mistaken for


determinate concepts) whose effect--as in Husserl--is to complicate the passage from what the text manifestly means to
say to what it actually says when read with an eye to its latent or covert signifying structures. This 'free-play' has nothing
whatsoever to do with that notion of an out-and-out hermeneutic license which would finally come down to a series of
slogans like "all reading is misreading," "all interpretation is misinterpretation," etc. If Derrida's texts have been read that
way--most often by literary critics in quest of more adventurous hermeneutic models--this is just one sign of the
widespread deformation professionelle that has attended the advent of deconstruction as a new arrival on the US
academic scene. (151)

In addition to Jacques Derrida, key poststructuralist and deconstructive figures include Michel Foucault (fou-KOH),
Roland Barthes (bart), Jean Baudrillard (zhon boh-dree-YAHR), Helene Cixous (seek-sou), Paul de Man (de-MAHN), J.
Hillis Miller, Jacques Lacan (lawk-KAWN), and Barbara Johnson.

Key Terms :

Aporia (ah-por-EE-ah)- a moment of undecidability; the inherent contradictions found in any text. Derrida, for example,
cites the inherent contradictions at work in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's use of the words culture and nature by
demonstrating that Rousseau's sense of the self's innocence (in nature) is already corrupted by the concept of culture
(and existence) and vice-versa.

Diffrance - a combination of the meanings in the word diffrance. The concept means 1) diffrer or to differ, 2)
diffrance which means to delay or postpone (defer), and 3) the idea of difference itself. To oversimplify, words are
always at a distance from what they signify and, to make matters worse, must be described by using other words.

Erasure (sous rature) - to highlight suspect ideologies, notions linked to the metaphysics of presence, Derrida put them
under "erasure," metaphorically pointing out the absence of any definitive meaning. By using erasure, however, Derrida
realized that a "trace" will always remain but that these traces do not indicate the marks themselves but rather the
absence of the marks (which emphasize the absence of "univocal meaning, truth, or origin"). In contrast, when
Heidegger similarly "crossed out" words, he assumed that meaning would be (eventually) recoverable.

Logocentrism - term associated with Derrida that "refers to the nature of western thought, language and culture since
Plato's era. The Greek signifier for "word," "speech," and "reason," logos possesses connotations in western culture for
law and truth. Hence, logocentrism refers to a culture that revolves around a central set of supposedly universal
principles or beliefs" (Wolfreys 302 - see General Resources below).

Metaphysics of Presence - "beliefs including binary oppositions, logocentrism, and phonocentrism that have been the
basis of Western philosophy since Plato" (Dobie 155, see General Resources below).

Supplement - "According to Derrida, Western thinking is characterized by the 'logic of supplementation', which is
actually two apparently contradictory ideas. From one perspective, a supplement serves to enhance the presence of
something which is already complete and self-sufficient. Thus, writing is the supplement of speech, Eve was the
supplement of Adam, and masturbation is the supplement of 'natural sex'....But simultaneously, according to Derrida,
the Western idea of the supplement has within it the idea that a thing that has a supplement cannot be truly 'complete in
itself'. If it were complete without the supplement, it shouldn't need, or long-for, the supplement. The fact that a thing
can be added-to to make it even more 'present' or 'whole' means that there is a hole (which Derrida called an originary
lack) and the supplement can fill that hole. The metaphorical opening of this "hole" Derrida called invagination. From
this perspective, the supplement does not enhance something's presence, but rather underscores its absence" (from
Wikipedia - definition of supplement).

Trace - from Lois Tyson (see General Resources below): "Meaning seems to reside in words (or in things) only when we
distinguish their difference from other words (or things). For example, if we believed that all objects were the same
color, we wouldn't need the word red (or blue or green) at all. Red is red only because we believe it to be different from
blue and green (and because we believe color to be different from shape). So the word red carries with it the trace of all
the signifiers it is not (for it is in contrast to other signifiers that we define it)" (245). Tyson's explanation helps explain
what Derrida means when he states "the trace itself does not exist."


Transcendental Signifier - from Charles Bressler (see General Resources below): a term introduced by Derrida who
"asserts that from the time of Plato to the present, Western culture has been founded on a classic, fundamental error: the
searching for a transcendental signified, an external point of reference on which one may build a concept or philosophy.
Once found, this transcendental signified would provide ultimate meaning. It would guarantee a 'center' of meaning...."
(287).

Further references:

Atkins, C. Douglas. Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1983.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1970. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London:Verso, 1988.
---. Cool Memories. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1990.
---. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. St. Lois: Telos P, 1973.
---. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. New York: Routledge, 1980.
Bloom, Harold, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller. Deconstruction and Criticism.
New York: Seabury, 1979.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1976.
De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust and Blindness and
Insight.
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Hartman, Geoffrey. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings.
Howells, Christina. Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics. Cambridge, 1999.
Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds.
Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore. 1980.
Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.
Sarup, Mandan. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.
Taylor, Mark C., ed. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
Young, Robert, ed. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader.
Suggested Websites:

Deconstruction - Wikipedia
Deconstruction: Some Assumptions - Dr. John Lye, Brock University
Deconstruction - Stanford University
Deconstruction - Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
Poststructuralism - Wikipedia
Structuralism/Poststructuralism - Dr. Mary Klages, University of Colorado at Boulder

Postmodernism
Though often used interchangeably with post-structuralism, postmodernism is a much broader term and encompasses
theories of art, literature, culture, architecture, and so forth. In relation to literary study, the term postmodernism has
been articulately defined by Ihab Hassan. In Hassan's formulation postmodernism differs from modernism in several
ways:

Modernism Post-Modernism
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy


Hypotactic Paratactic
Totalization Deconstruction
Presence Absence
Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface
Synthesis Antithesis
Urbanism Anarchy and fragmentation
Elitism Anti-authoritarianism

In its simplest terms, postmodernism consists of the period following high modernism and includes the many theories
that date from that time, e.g., structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and so forth. For Jean
Baudrillard, postmodernism marks a culture composed "of disparate fragmentary experiences and images that constantly
bombard the individual in music, video, television, advertising and other forms of electronic media. The speed and ease
of reproduction of these images mean that they exist only as image, devoid of depth, coherence, or originality" (Childers
and Hentzi 235).

Further references:

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations and Reflections.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation and Cool Memories.
Doherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader.
Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of
the Time, The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
McHale, Brian. Postmodern Fiction.
Suggested Websites:

"Postmodernism" - Dr. Mary Klages (University of Colorado at Boulder)
"Postmodernism is Fiction" - Pomono College
Postmodernism - Georgetown University
Postmodernism - Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
Postmodern Thought - Dr. Martin Ryder - University of Colorado at Denver
Postmodernism - Paul Newall, Galilean Library

New Historicism
New Historicism (sometimes referred to as Cultural Poetics) emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, largely in reaction to the
lingering effects of New Criticism and its ahistorical approach. "New" Historicism's adjectival emphasis highlights its
opposition to the old historical-biographical criticism prevalent before the advent of New Criticism. In the earlier
historical-biographical criticism, literature was seen as a (mimetic) reflection of the historical world in which it was
produced. Further, history was viewed as stable, linear, and recoverable--a narrative of fact. In contrast, New Historicism
views history skeptically (historical narrative is inherently subjective), but also more broadly; history includes all of the
cultural, social, political, anthropological discourses at work in any given age, and these various "texts" are unranked -
any text may yield information valuable in understanding a particular milieu. Rather than forming a backdrop, the many
discourses at work at any given time affect both an author and his/her text; both are inescapably part of a social
construct. Stephen Greenblatt was an early important figure, and Michel Foucault's (fou-KOH) intertextual methods
focusing especially on issues such as power and knowledge proved very influential. Other major figures include Clifford
Geertz, Louis Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, Jonathan Dollimore, and Jerome McCann.


Key Terms:

Discourse - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "defined by Michel Foucault as language practice: that is,
language as it is used by various constituencies (the law, medicine, the church, for example) for purposes to do with
power relationships between people"

Episteme - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "Michel Foucault employs the idea of episteme to indicate a
particular group of knowledges and discourses which operate in concert as the dominant discourses in any given
historical period. He also identifies epistemic breaks, radical shifts in the varieties and deployments of knowledge for
ideological purposes, which take place from period to period"

Power - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "in the work of Michel Foucault, power constitutes one of the
three axes constitutive of subjectification, the other two being ethics and truth. For Foucault, power implies knowledge,
even while knowledge is, concomitantly, constitutive of power: knowledge gives one power, but one has the power in
given circumstances to constitute bodies of knowledge, discourses and so on as valid or invalid, truthful or untruthful.
Power serves in making the world both knowable and controllable. Yet, in the nature of power, as Foucault suggests in
the first volume of his History of Sexuality, is essentially proscriptive, concerned more with imposing limits on its
subjects."

Self-positioning - [from Lois Tyson - see General Resources below] - "new historicism's claim that historical analysis is
unavoidably subjective is not an attempt to legitimize a self-indulgent, 'anything goes' attitude toward the writing of
history. Rather, the inevitability of personal bias makes it imperative that new historicists be aware of and as forthright as
possible about their own psychological and ideological positions relative to the material they analyze so that their readers
can have some idea of the human 'lens' through which they are viewing the historical issues at hand."

Thick description - a term developed by Clifford Geertz; [from Charles Bressler - see General Resources below]: a "term
used to describe the seemingly insignificant details present in any cultural practice. By focusing on these details, one can
then reveal the inherent contradictory forces at work within culture. "

Further References:

Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.
Cox, Jeffrey N. and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing
History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his
Contemporaries. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
---. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.
---. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: PUP, 2001.
---. Introduction. "The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance." Genre 15 (Summer 1982): 3-6.
---. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1991.
---. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989.
McCann, Jerome. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. OUP, 1985.
Montrose, Louis. "New Historicisms." Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American
Literary Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language Association, 1992.
Morris, Wesley. Toward a New Historicism. Princeton: PUP, 1972.
Vesser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Suggested Websites:

General Introduction to New Historicism - Dr. Dino Felluga
The New Historicism in Literary Study - D. G. Myers


New Historicism - Wikipedia
Definition of New Historicism - Bedford-St. Martin's Press
New Historicism - Dr. Barbara McManus
New Historicism (long .pdf file) - Martin Windisch - University of Stuttgart

Reception and Reader-Response Theory
Reader-response theory may be traced initially to theorists such as I. A. Richards (The Principles of Literary Criticism,
Practical Criticism and How to Read a Page) or Louise Rosenblatt (Literature as Exploration or The Reader, the Text,
the Poem). For Rosenblatt and Richards the idea of a "correct" reading--though difficult to attain--was always the goal of
the "educated" reader (armed, of course, with appropriate aesthetic apparatus). For Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in this
Class?, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of the
Seventeenth-Century Reader), the reader's ability to understand a text is also subject a reader's particular "interpretive
community." To simplify, a reader brings certain assumptions to a text based on the interpretive strategies he/she has
learned in a particular interpretive community. For Fish, the interpretive community serves somewhat to "police"
readings and thus prohibit outlandish interpretations. In contrast Wolfgang Iser argued that the reading process is always
subjective. In The Implied Reader, Iser sees reading as a dialectical process between the reader and text. For Hans-
Robert Jauss, however (Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, and Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics), a
reader's aesthetic experience is always bound by time and historical determinants.

Key Terms:

Horizons of expectations - a term developed by Hans Robert Jauss to explain how a reader's "expectations" or frame of
reference is based on the reader's past experience of literature and what preconceived notions about literature the reader
possesses (i.e., a reader's aesthetic experience is bound by time and historical determinants). Jauss also contended that for
a work to be considered a classic it needed to exceed a reader's horizons of expectations.

Implied reader - a term developed by Wolfgang Iser; the implied reader [somewhat akin to an "ideal reader"] is "a
hypothetical reader of a text. The implied reader [according to Iser] "embodies all those predispositions necessary for a
literary work to exercise its effect -- predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself.
Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct
and in no way to be identified with any real reader" (Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown - Glossary of Literary
Theory).

Interpretive communities - a concept, articulated by Stanley Fish, that readers within an "interpretive community" share
reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (Barbara McManus).

Transactional analysis - a concept developed by Louise Rosenblatt asserting that meaning is produced in a transaction of
a reader with a text. As an approach, then, the critic would consider "how the reader interprets the text as well as how
the text produces a response in her" (Dobie 132 - see General Resources below).

Further References:

Austin, J. L.How to Do Things with Words. 1962
Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. 1978
Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. 1975.
Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. 1981.
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. 1979.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
Holland, Norman. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1974.


---. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1974.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.
---. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. U of Minneapolis P, 1982.
Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. 1982
Holland, Norman. The Dynamics of Literary Response. 1968, 5 Readers Reading. 1975
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Methuen, 1982.
Richards, I.A. How to Read a Page. 1942.
---. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935.
Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. 1978.
Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.
Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton
UP, 1980.
Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1980.
Suggested Websites:

"Reader Response: Various Positions" - Dr. John Lye - Brock University
Reader Response Theory and Criticism - Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism - Wikipedia
"The Author, the Text, and the Reader" - Clarissa Lee Ai Ling, The London School of Journalism
Definition of Reader-Response Criticism - virtuaLit
"Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish" by Chris Lang
Wolfgang Iser (and reader-response theory) by David Albertson - Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and
Arts

Feminism
To speak of "Feminism" as a theory is already a reduction. However, in terms of its theory (rather than as its reality as a
historical movement in effect for some centuries) feminism might be categorized into three general groups:

theories having an essentialist focus (including psychoanalytic and French feminism);
theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist literary canon or theories seeking to re-interpret and re-vision
literature (and culture and history and so forth) from a less patriarchal slant (including gynocriticism, liberal feminism);
and
theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual politics (including gender studies, lesbian studies, cultural feminism,
radical feminism, and socialist/materialist feminism).
Further, women (and men) needed to consider what it meant to be a woman, to consider how much of what society has
often deemed inherently female traits, are culturally and socially constructed. Simone de Beauvoir's study, The Second
Sex, though perhaps flawed by Beauvoir's own body politics, nevertheless served as a groundbreaking book of feminism,
that questioned the "othering" of women by western philosophy. Early projects in feminist theory included resurrecting
women's literature that in many cases had never been considered seriously or had been erased over time (e.g., Charlotte
Perkins Gilman was quite prominent in the early 20th century but was virtually unknown until her work was "re-
discovered" later in the century). Since the 1960s the writings of many women have been rediscovered, reconsidered,
and collected in large anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.

However, merely unearthing women's literature did not ensure its prominence; in order to assess women's writings the
number of preconceptions inherent in a literary canon dominated by male beliefs and male writers needed to be re-
evaluated. Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique (1963), Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970), Teresa de Lauretis's Alice
Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984), Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975), Judith Fetterly's The
Resisting Reader (1978), Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The
Madwoman in the Attic (1979) are just a handful of the many critiques that questioned cultural, sexual, intellectual,
and/or psychological stereotypes about women.


Key Terms (this list is woefully inadequate; suggestions for additional terms would be appreciated):

Androgyny - taken from Women Studies page of Drew University - "'...suggests a world in which sex-roles are not rigidly
defined, a state in which the man in every woman' and the woman in every man' could be integrated and freely
expressed' (Tuttle 19). Used more frequently in the 1970's, this term was used to describe a blurring, or combination of
gender roles so that neither masculinity or femininity is dominant."

Backlash - a term, which may have originated with Susan Faludi, referring to a movement ( ca. 1980s) away from or
against feminism.

criture fminine - criture fminine, literally women's writing, is a philosophy that promotes women's experiences and
feelings to the point that it strengthens the work. Hlne Cixous first uses this term in her essay, "The Laugh of the
Medusa," in which she asserts, "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from
which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. criture fminine places experience before language,
and privileges the anti-linear, cyclical writing so often frowned upon by patriarchal society' (Wikipedia).

Essentialism - taken from Women Studies page of Drew University - "The belief in a uniquely feminine essence, existing
above and beyond cultural conditioning...the mirror image of biologism which for centuries justified the oppression of
women by proclaiming the natural superiority of men (Tuttle 90)." Tong's use of the term is relative to the explanation
of the division of radical feminism into radical-cultural and radical libertarian.

Gynocentrics - "a term coined by the feminist scholar-critic Elaine Showalter to define the process of constructing "a
female framework for analysis of women's literature [in order] to develop new models [of interpretation] based on the
study of female experience, rather than to adapt to male models and theories'" (Bressler 269, see General Resources
below).

Jouissance - a term most commonly associated with Helene Cixous (seek-sou), whose use of the word may have derived
from Jacques Lacan - "Cixous follows Lacan's psychoanalytic paradigm, which argues that a child must separate from its
mother's body (the Real) in order to enter into the Symbolic. Because of this, Cixous says, the female body in general
becomes unrepresentable in language; it's what can't be spoken or written in the phallogocentric Symbolic order. Cixous
here makes a leap from the maternal body to the female body in general; she also leaps from that female body to female
sexuality, saying that female sexuality, female sexual pleasure, feminine jouissance, is unrepresentable within the
phallogocentric Symbolic order" (Dr. Mary Klages, "Postructuralist Feminist Theory")

Patriarchy - "Sexism is perpetuated by systems of patriarchy where male-dominated structures and social arrangements
elaborate the oppression of women. Patriarchy almost by definition also exhibits androcentrism, meaning male centered.
Coupled with patriarchy, androcentrism assumes that male norms operate through out all social institutions and become
the standard to which all persons adhere" (Joe Santillan - University of California at Davis).

Phallologocentrism - "language ordered around an absolute Word (logos) which is masculine [phallic], systematically
excludes, disqualifies, denigrates, diminishes, silences the feminine (Nikita Dhawan).

Second- and Third-Wave feminism - "Second-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist thought that originated
around the 1960s and was mainly concerned with independence and greater political action to improve women's rights"
(Wikipedia). "Third-wave feminism is a feminist movement that arguably began in the early 1990s. Unlike second-wave
feminism, which largely focused on the inclusion of women in traditionally male-dominated areas, third-wave feminism
seeks to challenge and expand common definitions of gender and sexuality" (Wikipedia).

Semiotic - "[Julia] Kristeva (kris-TAYV-veh) makes a distinction between the semiotic and symbolic modes of
communication:

Symbolic = how we normally think of language (grammar, syntax, logic etc.)
Semiotic = non-linguistic aspects of language which express drives and affects


The semiotic level includes rhythms and sounds and the way they can convey powerful yet indefinable emotions" (Colin
Wright - University of Nottingham).

Further References on Psychoanalytic and French Feminism:

Cixous (seek-sou), Hlne. "The Laugh of the Medusa" or "Sorties: Out & Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays."
Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, 1990.
Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, 1982.
Grosz, E. A. (Elizabeth A.) Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Boston : Allen & Unwin, 1989.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, N.Y : Cornell University Press, 1985. HQ1154 .I7413 1985
Kristeva (kris-TAYV-veh), Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi, 1986.
Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminism. Brighton: Harvester, 1980.
Moi, Toril. Sexual/textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London ; New York : Methuen, 1985.PN98.W64 M65 1985
Oliver, Kelly, ed. French Feminism Reader. Rowman & Littlefield. 2000
Stanton, Domna. "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva." The
Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller, 1986.
Further References on Gynocriticism and Liberal Feminism:

Eisenstein, Zillah R. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, 1981.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. the Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Cednry
Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979.
Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." 1985.
---. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelist from Bront to Lessin. Princeton: PUP, 1977.
Wollstonecraft, Mary A. A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Further References on Gender Studies, G/L Studies, Cultural, Radical, and Socialist/Materialist Feminism:

Brooks, Ann. Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory, and Cultural Forms, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." 1993 .
Crow, Barbara A., ed. Radical Feminism: An Historical Reader, 1999.
Daly, Mary. Quintessence ... Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto, 1999.
Heller, Dana, ed. Cross-Purposes: Lesbian Studies, Feminist Studies, and the Limits of Alliance, 1997.
hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 1994.
James, Joy. SHADOWBOXING: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, 1999 .
Showalter, Elaine, ed. Speaking of Gender, 1989.
Spector, Judith, ed. Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, 1986.
Vicinus Martha, ed. Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader, 1996.
Suggested Websites:

Approaches to Feminism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"What is Feminism and Why Do We Have to Talk About It So Much?" by Dr. Mary Klages - University of Colorado at
Boulder
Feminism and Women's Studies - Carnegie Mellon U
Women's Studies Online Resources (Dr. Joan Korenman -Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Feminist Theory Website by Kristin Switala (Virginia Tech University)
Women's Studies Website - Karia Tonella, University of Iowa
Feminist Theory: An Overview - Elixabeth Lee - The Victorian Web
Feminist Majority Foundation
Feminist Theory - Wikipedia
Feminist Theory Resources

Genre Criticism


Study of different forms or types of literature. Genre studies often focus on the characteristics, structures, and
conventions attributed to different forms of literature, e.g., the novel, short story, poem, drama, film, etc. More recent
inquiry in genre criticism centers on the bias often inherent in genre criticism such as its latent (or overt) racism and
sexism.

Further Resources - Fiction:

Coe, Richard, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, eds. The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability
and Change. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2002.
Cohn, Dorit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1978. (discussion of first and third person narratology) PN 3448 P8 C6
Derrida, Jacques. "'The Law of Genre." Derek Attridge, (ed.) Acts of Literature. (New York and London: Routledge,
1992), 221 - 252.
Duff, David, ed. Modern Genre Theory. Pearson Education Limited, 2000.
Echer, Michael J.C. The Conditioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977
(argues that in approaching a work of literature that involves an exo-cultural character or theme we must take into
account the culturally conditioned imagination on the creation of a work of art) PR 408 .S64 E25
Fabb, Nigel. Language and Literary Structure: The Linguistic Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: CUP,
2002.
Fowler, Alistair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1982 - (on the nature of literary genres and how they are formed) PN 45 .5 F6
Hale, Dorothy. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford UP, 1998.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfred Lauren UP, 1980 (PN 3503 .H8)
Heiserman, Arthur. The Novel Before the Novel: Essays and Discussions About the Beginning of Prose Fiction in the
West. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977 ( traces beginnings of prose fiction to about the fourth century, A.D. ) - PA 3040
.H38
Keilman, Stephen B. The Self-Begetting Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1980 - (a study of the narrative method in
specific texts) PN 3503 .K4
McKeon, Michael, ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. John Hopkins Press, 2000.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shloinith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983 - excellent
brief book providing overview on narratology (PN 212 .R55)
Rosen, Alan. Dislocating the End: Climax, Closure, and the Invention of Genre. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Smith, Barbara Hernstein. On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1979 - argues that novels are usually imitations of nonfictive writing acts, such as the production of histories or
biographies (PN 54 .SE)
Spilka, Mark. Towards a Poetics of Fiction: Essays from Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977 -
collection of essays on various modern views and approaches to fictional critical theory (PN 3331 .T65)
Suleiman, Susan R. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. New York: Columbia UP, 1983 -
constructs a viable model of the roman a these as a genre (PQ 671 .S94)
Torgovnick, Marianna. Closure in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981 categorizes endings or closure in novels
into three types: circular, parallel and incomplete (PN 3378 .T6)
Watson, George. The Story of the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1979 discusses the elements that make a novel
memorable; treats three types of English novels: memoir novel, letter novel and the novel in the third person (PN
3491. .W3)
Stowe, William W. Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983 - uses three novels by James
and three by Balzac to construct a basis of systematic realism in the novel (PN 3499 .578)
Further Resources - Poetry:

Baker, Carlos. The Echoing Green: Romanticism, Modernism and the Phenomenon of Transference in Poetry.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984 - elegantly written discussion of Wordsworth, Coleridge Byron, Shelley and Keats and
then Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens and Auden (PS 310 .R66 B34)
Berg, Viola Jacobsen. Pathways for the Poet: Poetry Forms Explained and Illustrated. Millford: Mott Media, 1977 -
dictionary of poetic forms (PM 1042 .B47)
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Poetic Edifice: A Theory of 20th Century Poetry. Manchester UP, 1978 - argues that poetry
is resolutely artificial, even when it tries to imitate the diction and cadences of ordinary speech


Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: Random House, 1979 (this is the revised edition--a description,
history and review of theory on poetic meter and form (PH 1505 .F79 first edition 1965)
Hill, Archibald. Constituent and Pattern in Poetry. Austin: University of Texas P. 1977 - discussion of linguistic patterns
in poetry (PN 1042 .H46)
Haublein, Ernst. The Stanza. London: Methuen (Critical Idiom Series) historical description of stanzaic tradition (PM
1059 .S83)
Hartman, Charles 0. Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980 essay on the prosody of free
verse (PH 1531 .F73 H37) - surveys critical positions and emphasizes re-definitions of the term (PN 56 .P3 P37x)
McDonald, Peter. Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill. Oxford: Clarendon P, 2002.
Nemerov, Howard. Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of poetry and other Essays. Boston: David R.
Godine, - lively collection of essays. on poetry; what poetry is, the language of poetry, etc. (PN 1031 .N44)
Perkins, David. History of Modern Poetry: from the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976
- discussion of poetic traditions from 1890 to 1930 (PR 610 .P4)
Thompson, Denys. The Uses of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978 - aims at describing part played by poetry
from the earliest times to present day (PN 1111 .T5)
Welsh, Andrew. Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977 - traces modern
lyrical poetry back to its origins in primitive and folk rhythmical patterns (PN 1126 .W45
Further References - Drama:

Brockett, Oscar G. The Theatre: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: Holt, Rinhart, and Winston, 1979 - useful
reference work (PN 2101 .B7)
Caputi, Anthony. Buffo: The Genius of Vulgar Comedy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1978 - on the history of low comedy
and farce, from the Greeks to the present (PN 1922 .C3)
Goldman, Michael. On Drama: Boundaries of Genre, Borders of Self. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.
Howarth. W. D., ed. Comic Drama: The European Heritage. London: Methuen, 1977 series of papers that trace the
development of comic drama from its beginnings in ancient Greece to the 20th Century (PN 2928 .E8 C6)
Raber, Karen. Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama. Newark: U of
Delaware P, 2001.
Salgado, Gamini. English Drama: A Critical Introduction. London: Edward Arnold, 1980 - an account of drama in
England from its medieval beginnings to the early 1970s; excellent (PR 625 .S2)
Schleuter, June. Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia UP, 1979 discusses Pirandello, Genet,
Beckett, Weiss, Albee, Stoppard, Handke (PN 1861 .S3)
Seidel, Michael and Edward Mendelson. Homer to Beckett: The European Epic and Dramatic Tradition. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1977 - sixteen essays on the study of European epic and dramatic traditions (PN 56 .E65 H6)
Sinfield, Alan. Dramatic Monologue. London: Methuen, 1977
Further References - Short Story:

Allen, Waiter. The Short Story in English. New York: Oxford UP. mostly traces English language short story
(PR829 .A47)
May, Charles E., ed. Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976 - collection of essays by short story writers and critics
approaching short story as a genre form; good annotated bibliography (PN 3373 .S39)
Suggested Websites:

"An Introduction to Genre Theory" by David Chandler
"Genre Theory & Criticism: Historical Fiction Annotated Bibliography" - Dr. Cora Agatucci
"Genre Studies" - Wikipedia
"Genre" - The Museum of Broadcast Telecommunications
"Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata" by Dr. Bart Kuenen

Autobiographical Theory
As the critical attention to biography waned in the mid-twentieth century, interest in autobiography increased.
Autobiography paired well with theories such as structuralism and poststructuralism because autobiography was fertile


ground for considering the divide between fact and fiction, challenging the possibility of presenting a life objectively, and
examining how the shaping force of language prohibited any simple attempts at truth and reference. Classical
autobiographies focused on public figures, were, largely, written by men, and works theorizing autobiography primarily
treated men's life writing. Until the mid-1970s, little work was done on theorizing women's autobiographies. Major
theorists include (and this list, I'm sure, excludes several important writers) Bella Brodski, Paul de Man (de-MAHN),
Jacques Derrida (dair-ree-DAH), Paul John Eakin, Leigh Gilmore, Georges Gusdorf, Carolyn Heilbrun, Philippe
Lejeune, Franoise Lionnet, Mary G. Mason, Nancy K. Miller, Shirley Neuman, Felicity Nussbaum, James Olney, Roy
Pascal, Adrienne Rich, Sidonie Smith, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Domna Stanton, Julia Watson, and Karl Weintraub.

Further References:

Ashley, Kathleen, et al., eds. Autobiography and Postmodernism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
Bell, Susan Groag and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender. Albany: SUNY
Press, 1990.
Benstock, Shari. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Womens Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: U of North
Carolina Press, 1988.
Brodzki, Bella and Celeste Schenk. Life/Lines: Theorizing Womens Autobiography. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Bruss, Elizabeth W. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976.
Cixous, Hlne. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. London ; New York: Routledge, 1997.
Couser, Thomas. Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
de Man, Paul. "Autobiography as De-Facement." MLN 94 (1979): 919:30.
Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.
Eakin, John Paul, ed. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, PUP, 1985.
Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press,
1999.
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.
Gusdorf, Georges. "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography." Trans. James Olney. In Olney's Autobiography (see
below).
Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Hewitt, Leah. Autobiographical Tightropes. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
Jay, Paul. "Being in the Text: Autobiography and the Problem of the Subject." Modern Language Notes 97 (1982): 1046-
63.
Jelinek, Estelle. The Tradition of Women's Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne, 1986.
. Ed. Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Jolly, Margaretta. Ed.. (2001). Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical forms. (2 vols). London:
Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Foreword by Paul John Eakin. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994.
Mason, Mary G. "The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers." In Olney's Autobiography (see below).
Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Neuman, Shirley. "Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body." Signature 2 (Winter 1989): 1-26.
Nussbaum, Felicity. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1960.
Siegel, Kristi. Women's Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism. New York: Peter Lang, 1999, 2001. description
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. U of Minnesota P,
2001.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Spengemann, William. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in a History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP,
1980.


Stanley, Liz. The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography. Manchester/New York:
Manchester UP, 1992.
Stanton, Domna. "Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?" The Female Autograph. Eds. Domna Stanton and
Jeannine Parsier Plottel. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1984.
Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Weintraub, Karl. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
Suggested Websites:

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (journal edited by Rebecca Hogan, Joseph Hogan, and Emily Hipchen
"Autobiography" - The Literary Encyclopedia
Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography (book series) edited by William L. Andrews

Travel Theory
Interest in travel and travel writing has emerged as the result of an intellectual climate that is interrogating imperialism,
colonialism, postcolonialism, ethnography, diaspora, multiculturalism, nationalism, identity, visual culture, and map
theory. Travel theory's lexicon includes such words as transculturation, metropolitan center, "imperial eyes," contact
zones, border crossing, tourist/traveler, imperial frontier, hybridity, margin, expatriation/repatriation,
cosmopolitanism/localism, museology, displacement, home/abroad, arrival/return, road narrative, and diaspora, to
name just a few. Major theorists include Sara Mills, James Clifford, Anne McClintock, Mary Louise Pratt, Homi Bhabha
(bah-bah), Edward Said, Paul Fussell, Steven Clark, Inderpal Grewal, Guy Debord, Umberto Eco, Caren Kaplan, Dean
McCannell, James Urry, Jean Baudrillard (boh-dree-YAHR), and David Spurr.

References:

Baudrillard, Jean. America. 1986. Trans Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 1996.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
. ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1993.
Blunt, Alison. Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford P, 1994,
Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, and the Ways to Culture, 18001918. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
Chard, Chloe, and Helen Langdon. Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1996.
Chambers, Erve. Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism. Waveland Press, 1999.
Clark, Steven H, ed. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. Zed, 1999.
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Codrescu, Andrei. Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Conroy, Jane, ed. Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel--
National University of Ireland, Galway, November 2002 - Vol. 7, Travel Writing Across the Disciplines (pictured below
- series description)- New York: Peter Lang, 2003.
Cooper, Brenda. The Weary Sons of Conrad: White Fiction Against the Grain of Africa's Dark Heart. New York: Peter
Lang, 2002. Vol. 3 - Travel Writing Across the Disciplines. (pictured below - series description)
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
Desmond, Jane. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
Duncan, James and Gregory, Derek. Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. London: Routledge, 1999.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986.
Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.
Gilbert, Helen, and Anna Johnston, eds. In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire. Vol. 4 - Travel Writing Across the Disciplines
- (pictured below - series description). New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Groom, Eileen. Methods for Teaching Travel Literature and Writing: Exploring the World and Self. Vol. 9 - Travel
Writing Across the Disciplines (pictured below - series description). New York: Peter Lang, 2005.


Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Graham. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel
Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998.
Hutchinson, Sikivu. Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, And Transportation Politics in Los Angeles. Vol. 2 - Travel
Writing Across the Disciplines (pictured below - series description) - New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
Knowable, Michael, ed. Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel. Athens and London: U of
Georgia P, 1992.
Lackey, Kris. Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1997.
Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Theca and London: Cornell
UP, 1994.
Luck, Beth Taylor Fisher, eds. American Writers and the Picturesque Tour. Taylor & Francis, 1997.
McConnell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.
Meccano, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Rout ledge, 1995.
Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Womens Travel Writing and Colonialism. London and New York:
Rout ledge, 1991.
Morgan, Susan. Place Matters.New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996.
Paes de Barros, Deborah. Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women's Road Stories. Vol. 8 - Travel
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Primeau, Ronald. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State
UP, 1996.
Rojek, Chris, and James Urry, eds. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. London: Routledge, 1997.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
.Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Schmeller, Erik S. Perceptions of Race and Nation in English and American Travel Writers, 1833-1914. Vol. 5 - Travel
Shaffer, Marguerite S. Seeing America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940. Smithsonian Institution P, 2001.
Siegel, Kristi, ed. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women's Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. (description)
Siegel, Kristi, ed. Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
(description)
Smith, Sidonie. Moving Lives: Twentieth Century Women's Travel Narratives. U of Minnesota P, 2001.
Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration.
Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Urry, James. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications, 1990.
Watson, Sophie, and Katherine Gibson, eds. Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.
Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press, 1992.
Book Series - Travel Writing Across the Disciplines (series description) - Kristi Siegel, General Editor

The Travel Narratives of Ella Maillart (Steinert Borella)
Volume 12 Cross-Cultural Travel (Conroy)
Volume 7 In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire (Gilbert)
Volume 4 Weary Sons of Conrad
(Cooper)
Volume 3 Methods for Teaching Travel Literature and Writing (Groom)
Volume 9 Imagining Transit (Hutchinson)
Volume 2 Fast Cars and Bad Girls (Paes de Barros)
Volume 8 Perceptions of Race and Nation (Schmeller)

Suggested Websites:
(Note: many of these websites were suggested in Dr. Donald Ross's Snapshot Traveller)

International Society for Travel Writing (ISTW) - Dr. Donald Ross, of the University of Minnesota, also hosts a listserv
and writes the Snapshot Traveller - website
Studies in Travel Writing - edited by Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University)
The Journal of African Travel Writing
Literary Traveler (Nomad Group)


Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE)
Centre de Recherch sur la Littrature des Voyages (CRLV)

Other General Literary Theory Websites:

ACRL - Association of College and Research Libraries - Literary theory resources
Introductory Guide to Critical Theory by Dino F. Felluga of Purdue University
Literary Resources - Theory by Dr. Jack Lynch - Rutgers University
Contemporary Literary Theory - Dr. John Lye (Brock University)
Voice of the Shuttle Literary Theory Page by Dr. Alan Liu - USCB
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
Glossary of Literary Theory - University of Toronto
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (extensive range of articles on critical theory)
Swirl - Theory Resources at Southern Oregon University by Warren Hedges
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

General Resources - Bibliography of Critical Theory Texts

Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 3rd Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 2003.
Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, OUP, 2000.
Davis, Robert Con, and Ronald Schleifer. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (4th Edition).
Longman, 1988.
Dobie, Ann B. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Thomson, 2002.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Green, Keith and Jill LeBihan. Critical Theory & Practice: A Coursebook. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism . Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1994
Guerin, Wilfred L. et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th Ed. New York: OUP, 1999.
Hall, Donald E. Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Application. Boston: Houghton, 2001.
Jefferson, Anne. and D. Robey, eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. London: Batsford, 1986.
Keesey, Donald. Contexts for Criticism. 4th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003.
Latimer, Dan. Contemporary Critical Theory. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.
Lentriccia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980.
Lodge, David, with Nigel Wood. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. 2nd Ed. London: Longman, 1988.
Magill, Frank N, ed. Critical Survey of Literary Theory. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1987.
Makaryk, Irena R., ed. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Toronto: U of
Toronto P, 1993.
Murfin, Ross and Ray, Supryia M. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford/St.Martin's,
2003.
Natoli, Joseph, ed. Tracing Literary Theory. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1987.
Patai, Daphne and Will H. Corral. Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.
Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.
Selden, Raman and Peter Widdowson. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 3rd Ed. Lexington: U of
Kentucky P, 1993.
Staton, Shirley F., ed. Literary Theories in Praxis. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987.
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York & Long: Garland Publishing, 1999.
Walder, Dennis, ed. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. 2nd Ed. OUP, 2004.
Wolfreys, Julian. ed. Introducing Literary Theories: A Guide and Glossary . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003.


XIV. Critical Approaches to Literature
Critical approaches to literature reveal how or why a particular work is constructed and what its social
and cultural implications are. Understanding critical perspectives will help you to see and appreciate a literary
work as a multilayered construct of meaning. Reading literary criticism will inspire you to reread, rethink, and
respond. Soon you will be a full participant in an endless and enriching conversation about literature.

DECONSTRUCTION
Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has
irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller, the
preeminent American deconstructor, has explained in an essay entitled "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure"
(1976), "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already
dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air."
Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French philosopher on language
Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that in Western culture, people tend to
think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions. Something is white but not black, masculine
and therefore not feminine, a cause rather than an effect. Other common and mutually exclusive pairs include
beginning/end, conscious/unconscious, presence/absence, and speech/writing. Derrida suggests these
oppositions are hierarchies in miniature, containing one term that Western culture views as positive or superior
and another considered negative or inferior, even if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to
erase the boundary between binary oppositionsand to do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by the
oppositions is thrown into question.
Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic, deconstruction arose as a response to structuralism
and formalism. Structuralists believed that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be
understood as parts of a system of signs. Derrida did not believe that structuralists could explain the laws
governing human signification and thus provide the key to understanding the form and meaning of everything
from an African village to Greek myth to a literary text. He also rejected the structuralist belief that texts have
identifiable "centers" of meaninga belief structuralists shared with formalists.
Formalist critics, such as the New Critics, assume that a work of literature is a freestanding, self-contained
object whose meaning can be found in the complex network of relations between its parts (allusions, images,
rhythms, sounds, etc.). Deconstructors, by contrast, see works in terms of their undecidability. They reject the
formalist view that a work of literary art is demonstrably unified from beginning to end, in one certain way, or
that it is organized around a single center that ultimately can be identified. As a result, deconstructors see texts
as more radically heterogeneous than do formalists. Formalists ultimately make sense of the ambiguities they
find in a given text, arguing that every ambiguity serves a definite, meaningful, and demonstrable literary
function. Undecidability, by contrast, is never reduced, let alone mastered. Though a deconstructive reading can
reveal the incompatible possibilities generated by the text, it is impossible for the reader to decide among them.

FEMINIST CRITICISM
Feminist criticism became a dominant force in Western literary studies in the late 1970s, when feminist theory
more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980s, feminist literary
criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspective.
French feminist criticism garnered much of its inspiration from Simone de Beauvoirs seminal book, L
Deuxime Sexe (1949; The Second Sex). Beauvoir argued that associating men with humanity more generally
(as many cultures do) relegates women to an inferior position in society. Subsequent French feminist critics
writing during the 1970s acknowledged Beauvoirs critique but focused on language as a tool of male
domination, analyzing the ways in which it represents the world from the male point of view and arguing for
the development of a feminine language and writing.
Although interested in the subject of feminine language and writing, North American feminist critics of the
1970s and early 1980s began by analyzing literary textsnot by abstractly discussing languagevia close
textual reading and historical scholarship. One group practiced "feminist critique," examining how women


characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in the so-called classics, and demonstrating
that attitudes and traditions reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon.
Another group practiced what came to be called "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining
the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves and
imagined reality.
While it gradually became customary to refer to an Anglo-American tradition of feminist criticism, British
feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s objected to the tendency of some North American critics to find
universal or "essential" feminine attributes, arguing that differences of race, class, and culture gave rise to
crucial differences among women across space and time. British feminist critics regarded their own critical
practice as more political than that of North American feminists, emphasizing an engagement with historical
process in order to promote social change.
By the early 1990s, the French, American, and British approaches had so thoroughly critiqued, influenced, and
assimilated one another that nationality no longer automatically signaled a practitioners approach. Todays
critics seldom focus on "woman" as a relatively monolithic category; rather, they view "women" as members of
different societies with different concerns. Feminists of color, Third World (preferably called postcolonial)
feminists, and lesbian feminists have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are
female; other attributes (such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems
and goals of one group of women different from those of another.
Many commentators have argued that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism because of its focus
on the feminine gender. But the relationship between feminist and gender criticism is, in fact, complex; the two
approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather, exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex,
sexuality, gender, and language.

THE NEW HISTORICISM
The new historicism developed during the 1980s, largely in reaction to the text-only approach pursued by
formalist New Critics and the critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s. New historicists, like
formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with
an eye to history. In this respect, the new historicism is not "new"; the majority of critics between 1920 and
1950 focused on a works historical content and based their interpretations on the interplay between the text
and historical contexts (such as the authors life or intentions in writing the work).
In other respects, however, the new historicism differs from the historical criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. It
is informed by the poststructuralist and reader-response theory of the 1970s, as well as by the thinking of
feminist, cultural, and Marxist critics whose work was also "new" in the 1980s. They are less fact- and event-
oriented than historical critics used to be, perhaps because they have come to wonder whether the truth about
what really happened can ever be purely or objectively known. They are less likely to see history as linear and
progressive, as something developing toward the present, and they are also less likely to think of it in terms of
specific eras, each with a definite, persistent, and consistent zeitgeist (spirit of the times). Hence they are
unlikely to suggest that a literary text has a single or easily identifiable historical context.
New historicist critics also tend to define the discipline of history more broadly than did their predecessors.
They view history as a social science like anthropology and sociology, whereas older historicists tended to view
history as literature's "background" and the social sciences as being properly historical. They have erased the
line dividing historical and literary materials, showing not only that the production of one of William
Shakespeares historical plays was both a political act and a historical event, but also that the coronation of
Elizabeth I was carried out with the same care for staging and symbol lavished on works of dramatic art.
New historicists remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really wasrather than as we have
been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was. And they know that the job is impossible
for those who are unaware of that difficulty, insensitive to the bent or bias of their own historical vantage
point. Thus, when new historicist critics describe a historical change, they are highly conscious of (and even
likely to discuss) the theory of historical change that informs their account.
Many new historicists have acknowledged a profound indebtedness to the writings of Michel Foucault. A
French philosophical historian, Foucault brought together incidents and phenomena from areas normally seen
as unconnected, encouraging new historicists and new cultural historicists to redefine the boundaries of


historical inquiry. Like the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault refused to see history as an evolutionary
process, a continuous development from cause to effect, from past to present toward THE END, a moment
of definite closure, a Day of Judgment. No historical event, according to Foucault, has a single cause; rather,
each event is tied into a vast web of economic, social, and political factors. Like Karl Marx, Foucault saw
history in terms of power, but unlike Marx, he viewed power not simply as a repressive force or a tool of
conspiracy but rather as a complex of forces that produces what happens. Not even a tyrannical aristocrat
simply wields power, for the aristocrat is himself empowered by discourses and practices that constitute power.
Not all new historicist critics owe their greatest debt to Foucault. Some, like Stephen Greenblatt, have been
most nearly influenced by the British cultural critic Raymond Williams, and others, like Brook Thomas, have
been more influenced by German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Still othersJerome McGann, for
examplehave followed the lead of Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed literary works in terms of
polyphonic discourses and dialogues between the official, legitimate voices of society and other, more
challenging or critical voices echoing popular culture.
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Psychoanalytic criticism originated in the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pioneered the
technique of psychoanalysis. Freud developed a language that described, a model that explained, and a theory
that encompassed human psychology. His theories are directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of the
unconscious mind.
The psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests on the theories of Freud; it may even be said to have
begun with Freud, who wrote literary criticism as well as psychoanalytic theory. Probably because of Freuds
characterization of the artists mind as one urged on by instincts that are too clamorous, psychoanalytic
criticism written before 1950 tended to psychoanalyze the individual author. Literary works were read
sometimes unconvincinglyas fantasies that allowed authors to indulge repressed wishes, to protect
themselves from deep-seated anxieties, or both.
After 1950, psychoanalytic critics began to emphasize the ways in which authors create works that appeal to
readers repressed wishes and fantasies. Consequently, they shifted their focus away from the authors psyche
toward the psychology of the reader and the text. Norman Hollands theories, concerned more with the reader
than with the text, helped to establish reader-response criticism. Critics influenced by D.W. Winnicott, an
object-relations theorist, have questioned the tendency to see the reader/text as an either/or construct; instead,
they have seen reader and text (or audience and play) in terms of a relationship taking place in what Winnicott
calls a transitional or potential spacespace in which binary oppositions like real/illusory and
objective/subjective have little or no meaning.
Jacques Lacan, another post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist, focused on language and language-related issues.
Lacan treats the unconscious as a language; consequently, he views the dream not as Freud did (that is, as a
form and symptom of repression) but rather as a form of discourse. Thus we may study dreams
psychoanalytically in order to learn about literature, even as we may study literature in order to learn more
about the unconscious. Lacan also revised Freuds concept of the Oedipus complexthe childhood wish to
displace the parent of ones own sex and take his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite
sexby relating it to the issue of language. He argues that the pre-oedipal stage is also a preverbal or mirror
stage, a stage he associates with the imaginary order. He associates the subsequent oedipal stagewhich
roughly coincides with the childs entry into languagewith what he calls the symbolic order, in which words
are not the things they stand for but substitutes for those things. The imaginary order and the symbolic order
are two of Lacans three orders of subjectivity, the third being the real, which involves intractable and
substantial things or states that cannot be imagined, symbolized, or known directly (such as death).
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and seek to explain the
diversity (and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary works.
Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature as Exploration (1938). In her
1969 essay "Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading," she summed up her position as follows: "A poem is
what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text."
Recognizing that many critics would reject this definition, Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem
presupposes a reader actively involved with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking to emphasize the


objectivity of their interpretations." Rosenblatt implicitly and generally refers to formalists (the most influential
of whom are the New Critics) when she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked by the notion that
a "poem" is cooperatively produced by a "reader" and a "text." Formalists spoke of "the poem itself," the
"concrete work of art," the "real poem." They had no interest in what a work of literature makes a reader "live
through." In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley used the term
affective fallacy to define as erroneous the very idea that a readers response is relevant to the meaning of a
literary work.
Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true beginning of contemporary reader-
response criticism, also took issue with the tenets of formalism. In "Literature in the Reader: Affective
Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of criticism that sees a literary work as an object, claiming to
describe what it is and never what it does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading. Literature
exists and signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an affective one. Furthermore, reading is a
temporal process, not a spatial one as formalists assume when they step back and survey the literary work as if
it were an object spread out before them. The German critic Wolfgang Iser has described that process in The
Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974) and The Act of
Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues that texts contain gaps (or blanks) that powerfully
affect the reader, who must explain them, connect what they separate, and create in his or her mind aspects of
a work that arent in the text but are incited by the text.
With the re-definition of literature as something that only exists meaningfully in the mind of the reader, and
with the re-definition of the literary work as a catalyst of mental events, comes a re-definition of the reader. No
longer is the reader the passive recipient of those ideas that an author has planted in a text. "The reader is
active," Rosenblatt had insisted. Fish makes the same point in "Literature in the Reader": "Reading is . . .
something you do." Iser, in focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on the blanks that readers have to fill
in, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker of meaning. Other reader-response critics define the reader
differently. Wayne Booth uses the phrase the implied reader to mean the reader "created by the work." Iser also
uses the term the implied reader but substitutes the educated reader for what Fish calls the intended reader.
Since the mid-1970s, reader-response criticism has evolved into a variety of new forms. Subjectivists like
David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Robert Crosman have viewed the readers response not as one "guided"
by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-seated, personal, psychological needs. Holland has suggested
that, when we read, we find our own "identity theme" in the text by using "the literary work to symbolize and
finally replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire." Even Fish
has moved away from reader-response criticism as he had initially helped define it, focusing on "interpretive
strategies" held in common by "interpretive communities"such as the one comprised by American college
students reading a novel as a class assignment.
Fishs shift in focus is in many ways typical of changes that have taken place within the field of reader-
response criticisma field that, because of those changes, is increasingly being referred to as reader-oriented
criticism. Recent reader-oriented critics, responding to Fishs emphasis on interpretive communities and also to
the historically oriented perception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, have studied the way a given reading publics
"horizons of expectations" change over time. Many of these contemporary critics view themselves as reader-
oriented critics and as practitioners of some other critical approach as well. Certain feminist and gender critics
with an interest in reader response have asked whether there is such a thing as "reading like a woman."
Reading-oriented new historicists have looked at the way in which racism affects and is affected by reading and,
more generally, at the way in which politics can affect reading practices and outcomes. Gay and lesbian critics,
such as Wayne Koestenbaum, have argued that sexualities have been similarly constructed within and by social
discourses and that there may even be a homosexual way of reading.
STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including literature, are
thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described structuralism as a reaction to
"modernist alienation and despair."
European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Lvi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes (before his shift
toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a semiology, or semiotics (science of signs). Barthes, among


others, sought to recover literature and even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to
show that the laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing.
Structuralism was heavily influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Particularly useful to structuralists was Saussures concept of the phoneme (the smallest basic speech sound or
unit of pronunciation) and his idea that phonemes exist in two kinds of relationships: diachronic and
synchronic. A phoneme has a diachronic, or "horizontal," relationship with those other phonemes that precede
and follow it (as the words appear, left to right, on this page) in a particular usage, utterance, or narrative
what Saussure, a linguist, called parole (French for "word"). A phoneme has a synchronic, or "vertical,"
relationship with the entire system of language within which individual usages, utterances, or narratives have
meaningwhat Saussure called langue (French for "tongue," as in "native tongue," meaning language). An
means what it means in English because those of us who speak the language are plugged into the same system
(think of it as a computer network where different individuals can access the same information in the same way
at a given time).
Following Saussure, Lvi-Strauss, an anthropologist, studied hundreds of myths, breaking them into their
smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes." Removing each from its diachronic relations with other
mythemes in a single myth (such as the myth of Oedipus and his mother), he vertically aligned those mythemes
that he found to be homologous (structurally correspondent). He then studied the relationships within as well
as between vertically aligned columns, in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and
proportions, those thoughts and processes that humankind has shared, both at one particular time and across
time. Whether Lvi-Strauss was studying the structure of myths or the structure of villages, he looked for
recurring, common elements that transcended the differences within and among cultures.
Structuralists followed Saussure in preferring to think about the overriding langue, or language of myth, in
which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits meaningfully, rather than about isolated individual
paroles, or narratives. Structuralists also followed Saussure's lead in believing that sign systems must be
understood in terms of binary oppositions (a proposition later disputed by poststructuralist Jacques Derrida).
In analyzing myths and texts to find basic structures, structuralists found that opposite terms modulate until
they are finally resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus a structuralist reading of Milton's
Paradise Lost (1667) might show that the war between God and the rebellious angels becomes a rift between
God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son of God, the mediating third term.
Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and development, it was influenced
by American thinkers as well. Noam Chomsky, for instance, who powerfully influenced structuralism through
works such as Reflections on Language (1975), identified and distinguished between "surface structures" and
"deep structures" in language and linguistic literatures, including texts.

MARXIST CRITICISM
Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work and whose
practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the
prevailing social order. Rather than viewing texts as repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts
as material products to be understood in broadly historical terms. In short, literary works are viewed as a
product of work (and hence of the realm of production and consumption we call economics).
Marxism began with Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German philosopher best known for Das Kapital
(1867; Capital), the seminal work of the communist movement. Marx was also the first Marxist literary critic,
writing critical essays in the 1830s on such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Shakespeare.
Even after Marx met Friedrich Engels in 1843 and began collaborating on overtly political works such as The
German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), he maintained a keen interest in literature. In
The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the relationship between the arts, politics, and basic economic
reality in terms of a general social theory. Economics, they argue, provides the base, or infrastructure, of
society, from which a superstructure consisting of law, politics, philosophy, religion, and art emerges.
The revolution anticipated by Marx and Engels did not occur in their century, let alone in their lifetime. When
it did occur, in 1917, it did so in a place unimagined by either theorist: Russia, a country long ruled by despotic
czars but also enlightened by the works of powerful novelists and playwrights including Anton Chekhov,
Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Russia produced revolutionaries like Vladimir


Lenin, who shared not only Marx's interest in literature but also his belief in its ultimate importance. Leon
Trotsky, Lenin's comrade in revolution, took a strong interest in literary matters as well, publishing Literature
and Revolution (1924), which is still viewed as a classic of Marxist literary criticism.
Of those critics active in the Soviet Union after the expulsion of Trotsky and the triumph of Stalin, two stand
out: Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukcs. Bakhtin viewed languageespecially literary textsin terms of
discourses and dialogues. A novel written in a society in flux, for instance, might include an official, legitimate
discourse, as well as one infiltrated by challenging comments. Lukcs, a Hungarian who converted to Marxism
in 1919, appreciated pre revolutionary realistic novels that broadly reflected cultural "totalities" and were
populated with characters representing human "types" of the author's place and time.
Perhaps because Lukcs was the best of the Soviet communists writing Marxist criticism in the 1930s and
1940s, non-Soviet Marxists tended to develop their ideas by publicly opposing his. In Germany, dramatist and
critic Bertolt Brecht criticized Lukcs for his attempt to enshrine realism at the expense not only of the other
"isms" but also of poetry and drama, which Lukcs had largely ignored. Walter Benjamin praised new art forms
ushered in by the age of mechanical reproduction, and Theodor Adorno attacked Lukcs for his dogmatic
rejection of nonrealist modern literature and for his elevation of content over form.
In addition to opposing Lukcs and his overly constrictive canon, non-Soviet Marxists took advantage of
insights generated by non-Marxist critical theories being developed in postWorld War II Europe. Lucien
Goldmann, a Romanian critic living in Paris, combined structuralist principles with Marxs base superstructure
model in order to show how economics determines the mental structures of social groups, which are reflected
in literary texts. Goldmann rejected the idea of individual human genius, choosing instead to see works as the
"collective" products of "trans-individual" mental structures. French Marxist Louis Althusser drew on the ideas
of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who discussed the
relationship between ideology and hegemony, the pervasive system of assumptions and values that shapes the
perception of reality for people in a given culture. Althussers followers included Pierre Macherey, who in A
Theory of Literary Production (1966) developed Althussers concept of the relationship between literature and
ideology; Terry Eagleton, who proposes an elaborate theory about how history enters texts, which in turn may
alter history; and Frederic Jameson, who has argued that form is "but the working out" of content "in the realm
of the superstructure."

THE NEW CRITICISM
The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during the 1940s and 1950s
and that received its name from John Crowe Ransoms 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a
work of literature as if it were a self-contained, self-referential object. Rather than basing their interpretations of
a text on the readers response, the authors stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical
contexts (such as authors life), New Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on the relationships within
the text that give it its own distinctive character or form. New Critics emphasize that the structure of a work
should not be divorced from meaning, viewing the two as constituting a quasi-organic unity. Special attention is
paid to repetition, particularly of images or symbols, but also of sound effects and rhythms in poetry. New
Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices, such as irony, to achieve a balance or reconciliation
between dissimilar, even conflicting, elements in a text.
Because it stresses close textual analysis and viewing the text as a carefully crafted, orderly object containing
formal, observable patterns, the New Criticism has sometimes been called an "objective" approach to literature.
New Critics are more likely than certain other critics to believe and say that the meaning of a text can be known
objectively. For instance, reader-response critics see meaning as a function either of each readers experience or
of the norms that govern a particular interpretive community, and deconstructors argue that texts mean
opposite things at the same time.
The foundations of the New Criticism were laid in books and essays written during the 1920s and 1930s by I.
A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]), William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), and T. S. Eliot
("The Function of Criticism" [1933]). The approach was significantly developed later, however, by a group of
American poets and critics, including R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate,
Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. Although we associate the New Criticism with certain principles
and termssuch as affective fallacy (the notion that the readers response is relevant to the meaning of a work)


and intentional fallacy (the notion that the authors intention determines the works meaning)the New Critics
were trying to make a cultural statement rather than to establish a critical dogma. Generally southern, religious,
and culturally conservative, they advocated the inherent value of literary works (particularly of literary works
regarded as beautiful art objects) because they were sick of the growing ugliness of modern life and
contemporary events. Some recent theorists even link the rising popularity after World War II of the New
Criticism (and other types of formalist literary criticism such as the Chicago School) to American isolationism.
These critics tend to view the formalist tendency to isolate literature from biography and history as
symptomatic of American fatigue with wider involvements. Whatever the source of the New Criticisms
popularity (or the reason for its eventual decline), its practitioners and the textbooks they wrote were so
influential in American academia that the approach became standard in college and even high school curricula
through the 1960s and well into the 1970s.

FORMALISM
Formalism is a general term covering several similar types of literary criticism that arose in the 1920s and
1930s, flourished during the 1940s and 1950s, and are still in evidence today. Formalists see the literary work as
an object in its own right. Thus, they tend to devote their attention to its intrinsic nature, concentrating their
analyses on the interplay and relationships between the texts essential verbal elements. They study the form of
the work (as opposed to its content), although form to a formalist can connote anything from genre (for
example, one may speak of "the sonnet form") to grammatical or rhetorical structure to the "emotional
imperative" that engenders the work's (more mechanical) structure. No matter which connotation of form
pertains, however, formalists seek to be objective in their analysis, focusing on the work itself and eschewing
external considerations. They pay particular attention to literary devices used in the work and to the patterns
these devices establish.
Formalism developed largely in reaction to the practice of interpreting literary texts by relating them to
"extrinsic" issues, such as the historical circumstances and politics of the era in which the work was written, its
philosophical or theological milieu, or the experiences and frame of mind of its author. Although the term
formalism was coined by critics to disparage the movement, it is now used simply as a descriptive term.
Formalists have generally suggested that everyday language, which serves simply to communicate information,
is stale and unimaginative. They argue that "literariness" has the capacity to overturn common and expected
patterns (of grammar, of story line), thereby rejuvenating language. Such novel uses of language supposedly
enable readers to experience not only language but also the world in an entirely new way.
A number of schools of literary criticism have adopted a formalist orientation, or at least make use of formalist
concepts. The New Criticism, an American approach to literature that reached its height in the 1940s and
1950s, is perhaps the most famous type of formalism. But Russian formalism was the first major formalist
movement; after the Stalinist regime suppressed it in the early 1930s, the Prague Linguistic Circle adopted its
analytical methods. The Chicago School has also been classified as formalist, insofar as the Chicago critics
examined and analyzed works on an individual basis; their interest in historical material, on the other hand, was
clearly not formalist.

POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM
A type of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary texts produced in
countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their
history. Alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized places by writers hailing from
the colonizing culture. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies,
focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has invented false images and myths of the Third
(postcolonial) Worldstereotypical images and myths that have conveniently justified Western exploitation
and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and peoples. In the essay "Postcolonial Criticism"


(1992), Homi K. Bhabha has shown how certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their
political and social domination in the modern world order.
Postcolonial studies, a type of cultural studies, refers more broadly to the study of cultural groups, practices,
and discoursesincluding but not limited to literary discoursesin the colonized world. The term postcolonial
is usually used broadly to refer to the study of works written at any point after colonization first occurred in a
given country, although it is sometimes used more specifically to refer to the analysis of texts and other cultural
discourses that emerged after the end of the colonial period (after the success of the liberation and
independence movements). Among feminist critics, the postcolonial perspective has inspired an attempt to
recover whole cultures of women heretofore ignored or marginalizedwomen who speak not only from
colonized places but also from the colonizing places to which many of them fled.
Postcolonial criticism has been influenced by Marxist thought, by the work of Michel Foucault (whose theories
about the power of discourses have influenced the new historicism), and by deconstruction, which has
challenged not only hierarchical, binary oppositions such as West/East and North/South but also the notions
of superiority associated with the first term of each opposition.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright
1998 by Bedford Books.


Myth Criticism
Adapted from: http://www.textetc.com/criticism/myth-criticism.html
Overview
Myth criticism attempts to bring out the cultural myths underlying literature, and many are
indeed apparent in this poem: time, sea, land and sky, control, creation, decay and
regeneration. Some need to be developed more fully.

Introduction
Far from being primitive fictions about the natural world, some supposed ancestor, or tribal practice myths are
reflections of a profound reality. They dramatically represent our instinctive understandings. Moreover, unlike Freud's
concepts, myths are collective and communal, and so bring a sense of wholeness and togetherness to social life. Native
peoples, and indeed whole civilizations, have their own mythologies, but there appear to be common images, themes and
motives {1} which Jung called "archetypes".{2}
The mythology of the classical world provided themes for some of the world's greatest drama, {3} and similar themes
can be traced in Renaissance literature {4} through to modern poetry. {5} Hamlet, for example, is often seen as the
reluctant hero who must sacrifice himself to purify a Denmark made diseased by the foul and unnatural murder of its
king. {6} Yeats, Pound and Eliot employ the myths of history, rebirth and fulfillment through sacrifice {7}, as do other
poets. {8}
Myth criticism continues to draw freely on the psychology of Jung, on social anthropology, on the study of religions {9},
on metaphor and depth psychology, but the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye has attempted to redefine what
criticism is, and what it can be expected to do. {10}
Frye attempted a general theory of literature, which he approached from four perspectives. Rather that justify what were
little more than matters of preference (i.e. squabble over the relative merits of authors and their works) scholars should
derive principles, structures and laws from the study of literature itself. His first essay in Anatomy of Criticism recognized
various levels of realism in literature, an articulation he termed a theory of modes. The second essay put forward a theory
of symbols, recognizing five levels ranging from the mundane to the anagogic (the last represented in work of a religious
or spiritual nature).
The theory of myths that forms the third essay has possibly been Frye's most influential contribution. He starts by
identifying the four seasons spring, summer, autumn and winter with the four main plots or 'mythoi' of romance,
comedy, tragedy, and irony/satire. These are further broken down into phases. The mythos of winter consists of six
phases, the last representing human life in terms of unrelieved bondage: prisons, madhouses, lynching mobs and places
of execution. The human figures of this phase are the dispossessed, the destitute and mad-ogres, witches, Baudelaire's
black giantess and Pope's Dullness. Frye distinguishes between signs (which point outward to things beyond themselves)
and motifs (which are understood inwardly as parts of a verbal structure). Literature is preeminently an autonomous
verbal structure where the sign-values are subordinate to the interconnectedness of motifs. The fourth essay proposes a
theory of genres, where Frye outlined the differences between the lyric, epic, dramatic work, etc.
Frye's approach was invigorating, but has not been broadly accepted. His categories seem arbitrary, and many works of
art do not fit neatly into any category. For all his learning, Frye's focus was on western literature and its classification. So
general a view does not help the practising poet with rewriting, or the critic explaining how one piece of literature is
better than another, beyond of course understanding the larger picture. Finally, though Frye's own criticism was subtle
and illuminating, the approach too easily degenerated into "hunt the symbol" exercises. {11}


But important matters lie behind symbolism. Literature employs words, and the reality behind words has been the
central preoccupation of twentieth century philosophy. Linguistic philosophy attempted to explain away the great
philosophical dilemmas of existence as the improper use of words. Structuralism described literature as the surface
expression of deep anthropological (and often) binary codes. Poststructuralism denied that words could be anything but
part of an endless web of yet more words, without final referent or meaning. Postmodernism uses words as flat, media
images, without deeper reference.
None of these has been very unconvincing. Words do have great emotional and intellectual power if employed in certain
ways, and these ways draw on matters of deep and lasting interest to the human psyche. Mythic criticism (indeed all
criticism: Frye makes this point) is subsequent to literature, as history is to action. We cannot clothe with plot and
character the skeletal requirements of criticism and expect literature to result. Works of art follow their own devices and
grow out of the artist's imagination, only submitting to criticism if they still seem incomplete or unsatisfactory.
But mythic criticism can show the writer where his imagery is coming from, and suggest reasons for its power.
Subsequent work deep thought, reading and endless toying with possibilities may then turn up further material.
Whether that material is useful can only be found by testing it in the poem, a trial and error process of continual
adaptation and refinement that may eventually achieve the strengths of the coherence theory of truth: transforming
power, internal consistency, simplicity, elegance and fertility.
Published Examples of Myth Criticism
Kenneth Burke. Counter-Statement. 1953.
John Livingston Lowes. The Road to Xanadu. 1927.
Caroline Spurgeon. Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us. 1935.
Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism. 1957.
Time
We start by taking in turn the archetypal themes represented: time, sea, land and sky, control, creation, illness and
regeneration. The poem:
The Architects
But, as you'd expect, they are very
Impatient, the buildings, having much in them
Of the heavy surf of the North Sea, flurrying
The grit, lifting the pebbles, flinging them
With a hoarse roar against the aggregate
They are composed of the cliffs higher of course,
More burdensome, underwritten as
It were with past days overcast
And glinting, obdurate, part of the
Silicate of tough lives, distant and intricate
As the whirring bureaucrats let in
And settled with coffee in the concrete pallets,


Awaiting the post and the department meeting
Except that these do not know it, at least do not
Seem to, being busy, generally.
So perhaps it is only on those cloudless, almost
Vacuumed afternoons with tier upon tier
Of concrete like rib- bones packed above them,
And they light-headed with the blue airiness
Spinning around, and muzzy, a neuralgia
Calling at random like frail relations, a phone
Ringing in a distant office they cannot get to,
That they become attentive, or we do these
Divisions persisting, indeed what we talk about,
We, constructing these webs of buildings which,
Caulked like great whales about us, are always
Aware that some trick of the light or weather
Will dress them as friends, pleading and flailing
And fill with placid but unbearable melodies
Us in deep hinterlands of incurved glass.
C. John Holcombe 1997
Time is introduced immediately expect and impatient continues with past days and is then maintained by tense
changes (present in stanza 3, past in stanza 4, present in stanza 5, present and future in stanza 6). Time is one of the
most fundamental archetypes, and here it appears in typical form, a mystical immersion into cyclical time. But the subject
isn't man directly but the buildings he inhabits. More exactly, it is their constituents. Buildings are largely constructed of
glass (sand), brick (baked clay) and concrete (aggregate, steel and burnt limestone), all of which are dug out of the earth.
In time the buildings will decay, be knocked down, and the rubble dumped to make new fill. Even the land is not
everlasting but is ceaselessly worn away by water, which may grind the hardest materials to pebbles but also deposit the
pebbles in sea-cliffs or river terraces, where they become sources of aggregate again. Man can only mimic on a small
scale what geological processes are doing constantly: eroding the land and remaking it by deposition, metamorphism,
and orogenic uplift.
Human life is fleeting, and man's usual victory over mortality is only through reproduction and the achievements of the
societies which outlive him. But here the immortality considered is buildings, which are constructed like termite mounds
on the land he occupies, and so brought into the ceaseless cycle of geological creation. But the emphasis on "silicate", of
which sand is the most familiar example, also suggests deserts, death, spiritual aridity and nihilism. The constituents of
the building were created by the pounding of the North Sea, and indeed carry echoes of that creation within them (having
much in them / Of the North Sea), but now they are inert, immobilized, can only be released when the buildings are
reconstructed.
Sea
Equally a symbol of death and regeneration is the sea, which appears in stanza 1 as the heavy surf of the North Sea and again
in the last stanza with the great whales that fill with placid but unbearable melodies / Us in the deep hinterlands of incurved glass. What
are these hinterlands but a sea of glass that seems to draw us in (deep) and drown us in its impenetrable reflection? The
poem, which starts and ends with aspects of the sea, is again cyclical, and in this incarnation the sense of imprisonment
in his own creations is even stronger (pleading and flailing, unbearable and deep hinterlands)
Land and Sky


Generally, at least in Aryan mythology, the earth is a mother goddess and the sky a paternal figure. {12} It is therefore
striking that the fourth stanza, where the sky (cloudless...afternoons, blue airiness / Spinning around) is clearly evoked, is marked
by a change of thought (So perhaps...). We are still with the bureaucrats, but have joined them in their high office block,
where they seem out of their element (lightheaded with the blue airiness / Spinning around, and muzzy) and barely able to cope
(frail relations and a distant office they cannot get to). The sky theme is not continued, and indeed the bureaucrats themselves
are abruptly replaced by the architects (they become attentive, or we do), who introduce the whales and the submarine imagery.
Control
Bureaucrats are unimaginative officials who administer by rule and regulation. Their lives are described here as tough ...
distant and intricate. Silicates are complex molecules but do not make up living structures. The bureaucrats are not creating
anything (awaiting the post and the department meeting and are indeed settled ... in concrete pallets, appearing like so much paper
stock in warehouses.
We are in the world of the dead Frye's winter myth and the sense of imprisonment is again strong, although not
realized by its inhabitants (Except that these do not know it ... being busy, generally.)
Creators
Since architects are creative people, and start their training in art colleges, the title no doubt has some bearing on
imaginative processes, with creating something not existing before. But architects are not identified by name, only
appearing by default in the "we" of line 23, where they occupy the focus of attention as the bureaucrats fade out. The
switch is conscious (they become attentive), for both parties (or we do), but the responsibilities are not seized upon with any
confidence. Indeed, the buildings are likened to whales, gentle but doomed creatures, whose plight is all too vivid to
their creators (fill with placid but unbearable melodies). What is being indicated?
Mythologies have much to say on creation (since the existence of a world at all requires explanation) but creation is
usually seen as only part of the endless cycle of birth and death, building and destruction, appearance and disappearance.
As was noted before, there are suggestions of spiritual aridity in the buildings' constituents, and this affliction is extended
to the bureaucrats, who perform meaningless, self-centred tasks. The architects are very different, and from the arid
world of silicates immediately plunge us into the sea with their talk of whales. But note Aware that some trick of the light or
weather / Will dress them as friends, which emphasizes the separateness of whales, their difference from humans. In some
undisclosed way we have the suggestion that the architects, and thus the creative process itself, are being dragged into
depths where they cannot function. They can hear the placid but unbearable melodies but are powerless to help, being
fastened in the deep hinterlands of incurved glass.
Illness
Spiritual aridity brings sickness, and almost on cue the light-headedness of stanza 4 brings not elation but neuralgia. And
even that complaint is not accessible to treatment, but appears inconsequential (Calling at random like frail relations) and at
some remove (a phone / Ringing in a distant office they cannot get to). Indeed the content of lines 18 to 22 seems to valorize
into the ether, perhaps emphasized by the word ringing. Subsequently, the imagery becomes more tactile (Divisions, great
whales, trick, dress), but no more certain. Something is wrong, but exactly what remains unclear. Awareness has an element
of chicanery and dressing up (Aware that some trick of the light or weather / Will dress them as friends) Perhaps it is the very
illness itself that creates such a troubling view of the world.
Regeneration
The cyclic nature of building is clear enough in the first half of the poem, but where is the complementary response to
decay and destruction? Mythologies emphasize that life grows from death, that lives, societies, artistic creations all have
their growth, flowering, seeding, winter and rebirth. Where do we find this in the poem? It seems not to exist, which
may account for the melancholy of the last stanza, and the uncomfortable imprisonment of the last line.


Conclusions: Suggestions
How do we pull all this together? The indications are intriguing but not going in one direction, or anywhere at all. Can
that be the subject of the poem a perplexing sense of otherness, a vague feeling that much is wrong with modern life,
that neither the bureaucrats or the architects have either control over their lives in any meaningful way, or belong to a
larger process of life-enhancement and renewal? The poem is a sort of modern Waste Land, much less ambitious than
Eliot's and limited to an aspect of the natural world.
If that is so, then a good deal needs to be resolved if the piece is to work as a traditional poem, notably:
the storm imagery of stanza 2: where does this fit in?
the office situation of stanza 5: should this remain so nebulous?
the identity of the reader referred to by "you", "we" and "us". Who is being buttonholed in this way? If they are
different, should this not be made clearer?
the status of the deep hinterlands with which the poem concludes. In what sense is the reader imprisoned in this incurved
glass?
the incompleteness of the cycle. Where is the regeneration?
Of course, if the poem is not traditional but Postmodernist in intention, then none of these recommendations apply. Its
arbitrary and fragmented nature may very well be an apt copy of modern life itself.
Some of the shortcomings have been corrected in a new version, now entitled Office Workers.
References
1. Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959), and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1922).
2. Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934).
3. Gilbert Murray's Euripides and his Age (1913), and Francis Cornford's Origin of Attic Comedy (1914).
4. Gilbert Murray's The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927), and Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater (1949).
5. Lillian Feder's Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry (1971).
6. Philip Wheelright's The Burning Fountain (1954), and Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill
(1969).
7. Daniel Hoffman's Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves and Muir (1967), Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of
Ezra Pound (1951), and George Williamson's A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot (1966).
8. Feder 1971.
9. Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane (1959).
10. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957).
11. pp. 344-349 in David Daiches's Critical Approaches to Literature (1981).
12. Campbell 1959.
Internet Resources
1. Paganism and Myths of Creation: A Ritual of Transformation. Walter Wright Arthen. Nov. 2002.
http://www.earthspirit.com/fireheart/fhpmyth.html. Creation myths in different cultures.
2. Joseph Campbell Foundation. http://www.jcf.org/. Continues the work of this popular researcher into mythology.
3. Myths Among Us. http://www.mythsamongus.com/. Articles and links for the mythology of Jung, Campbell and
others.
4. Mything Links. Kathleen Jenks. http://www.mythinglinks.org/. Extensive links to mythologies, fairy tales, sacred art
and traditions.
5. The Psychological in the Neighborhood of Thought and Poetry: The Uncanny Logos of the Psyche. Michael P.
Sipiora. http://www.janushead.org/3-1/msipiora.cfm. Heidegger, Jung and Freud in the writing of poetry.


6. Jungian, Archetypal, Imaginal, and Depth Psychology. 1995. http://www.arespress.com/AresPages/Story.html.
Helpful synopsis.
7. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Paul Bishop. 2003. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cjung.htm. Books and Writers article.
8. Carl Jung 1875-1961. Oct. 2001. http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Jung.htm. Short article and a good
range of listings.
9. C.G. Jung. http://www.cgjungpage.org/. Very full site devoted to life and work of Carl Jung.
10. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Kelley L. Ross. 2002. http://www.friesian.com/jung.htm. Jung's works from a
Friesian philosophical perspective.
11. Quakerism and Jungian Psychology. John R. Yungblut. Apr. 2001. http://www.quaker.org/fcrp/yungblut.html.
Religious dimension to Jungian psychology.
12. C.G. Jung Institute of Boston. http://www.cgjungboston.com/. Useful resources on links page.
13. Carl Gustav Jung. Tom Gannon. Apr. 2002. http://www.usd.edu/~tgannon/jung.html. Good listing of websites.
14. Jung Reading List. Tom Davis. 2000. http://www.bham.ac.uk/english/bibliography/
theories_of_the_mind/ReadingLists/junglist.htm. Good bibliography, but not online.
15. Jungian, Archetypal, Imaginal, and Depth Psychology. 1995. http://www.arespress.com/AresPages/Story.html.
Brief account of differences.
16. What Is Depth Psychology? Craig Chalquist. http://www.tearsofllorona.com/depth.html. Introductory account.
17. Depth Psychology. http://www.talentdevelop.com/depthpsych.html. Selected articles on Jungian and depth
psychology.
18. James Hillman. http://www.mythosandlogos.com/Hillman.html. Hillman's page at Mythos and Logos, with extensive
listings.
19. Quantum Physics, Depth Psychology, and Beyond. Thomas J. McFarlane. Jun. 2000.
http://www.integralscience.org/psyche-physis.html. Larger correspondences between Jungian psychology and quantum
physics.
20. Northrop Frye. 1999. http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/critical/frye.htm. Introduction and link.
21. Northrop Frye: Polemical Introduction. http://www.noteaccess.com/Texts/Frye/Intro.htm. Short excerpts from
his writings.
22. The Legacy of Northrop Frye by Alvin A.Lee and Robert Denham (eds.) 1995.
http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol5/miller06.html. Extended book review.
23. Northrop Frye Centre. http://vicu.utoronto.ca/fryecentre/. Promotes interest and research into the critic's work.
24. Caroline Spurgeon. "Shakespeare's Imagery". Aug. 1998.
http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/Shakespeare_Abstracts/_disc4/00000061.htm. Note on the book.
25. Storytelling Organizations. David M. Boje. http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/storytellingorg.html. Storytelling
structues, with a mention of Burke.
26. Disciplining The Master: Finding the Via Media for Kenneth Burke. Andrew King. 2001.
http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss2/special/King.htm. Burke's aims and importance.
27. Bibliography of Secondary Sources on Kenneth Burke 1924-2002. David Blakesley. 2002.
http://www.sla.purdue.edu/dblakesley/burke/secondary.pdf. Some 766 listed, not online.
28. Substantive & Essentialist Definitions of Religion. http://atheism.about.com/libra
C. John Holcombe 2007. Material can be freely used for non-commercial purposes if cited in the usual way.


Periods of English Literature

Old English/Anglo-Saxon Period
Years: 449-1066

Content:
strong belief in fate
juxtaposition of church and pagan worlds
admiration of heroic warriors who prevail in battle
express religious faith and give moral instruction through literature

Style/Genres:
oral tradition of literature
poetry dominant genre
unique verse form
caesura
alliteration
repetition
4 beat rhythm

Effect:
Christianity helps literacy to spread
introduces Roman alphabet to Britain
oral tradition helps unite diverse peoples and their myths

Historical Context:
life centered around ancestral tribes or clans that ruled themselves
at first the people were warriors from invading outlying areas: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes
later they were agricultural

Key Literature/Authors:
Beowulf
Bede
Exeter Book

Middle English Period (The Medieval Period)
Years: 1066-1485

Content:
plays that instruct the illiterate masses in morals and religion
chivalric code of honor
romances
religious devotion

Style/Genres:
oral tradition continues


folk ballads
mystery and miracle plays
morality plays
stock epithets
kennings
frame stories
moral tales

Effect:
church instructs its people through the morality and miracle plays
an illiterate population is able to hear and see the literature

Historical Context:
Crusades bring the development of a money economy for the first time in Britain
trading increases dramatically as a result of the Crusades
William the Conqueror crowned king in 1066
Henry III crowned king in 1154 brings a judicial system, royal courts, juries, and chivalry to Britain

Doomsday Book
LMorte de Arthur
Geoffrey Chaucer

The Renaissance
Years: 1485-1660

Content:
world view shifts from religion and after life to one stressing the human life on earth
popular theme: development of human potential
popular theme: many aspects of love explored
o unrequited love
o constant love
o timeless love
o courtly love
o love subject to change

Style/Genres:
poetry
sonnet
drama
written in verse
supported by royalty
tragedies, comedies, histories
metaphysical poetry
elaborate and unexpected metaphors called conceits

Effect:
commoners welcomed at some play productions (like ones at the Globe) while conservatives try to close the
theaters on grounds that they promote brazen behaviors
not all middle-class embrace the metaphysical poets and their abstract conceits


Historical Context:
War of Roses ends in 1485 and political stability arrives
Printing press helps stabilize English as a language and allows more people to read a variety of literature
Economy changes from farm-based to one of international trade

William Shakespeare
John Donne
Cavalier Poets
Metaphysical Poets
Christopher Marlowe
Andrew Marvell

Neoclassical Period (The Restoration)
Years: 1660-1798

Content:
emphasis on reason and logic
stresses harmony, stability, wisdom
Locke: a social contract exists between the government and the people. The government governs guaranteeing
natural rights of life, liberty, and property

Style/Genres:
satire: uses irony and exaggeration to poke fun at human faults and foolishness in order to
correct human behavior
poetry
essays
letters, diaries, biographies
novels

Effect:
emphasis on the individual
belief that man is basically evil
approach to life: the world as it should be

Historical Context:
50% of the men are functionally literate (a dramatic rise)
Fenced enclosures of land cause demise of traditional village life
Factories begin to spring up as industrial revolution begins
Impoverished masses begin to grow as farming life declines and factories build
Coffee houseswhere educated men spend evenings with literary and political associates

Alexander Pope,
Daniel Defoe,
Jonathan Swift,
Samuel Johnson,
John Bunyan

Romanticism


Years: 1798 1832

Content:
human knowledge consists of impressions and ideas formed in the individuals mind
introduction of gothic elements and terror/horror stories and novels
in nature one can find comfort and peace that the man-made urbanized towns and factory environments
cannot offer

Style/Genres:
poetry
lyrical ballads

Effects:
evil attributed to society not to human nature
human beings are basically good
movement of protest: a desire for personal freedom
children seen as hapless victims of poverty and exploitation

Historical Context:
Napoleon rises to power in France and opposes England militarily and economically
gas lamps developed
Tory philosophy that government should NOT interfere with private enterprise
middle class gains representation in the British parliament
Railroads begin to run

Novelists:
Jane Austen,
Mary Shelley
Poets:
Robert Burns,
William Blake,
William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Lord Byron,
Percy Shelley,
John Keats

Victorian Period
Years: 1832-1900

Content:
conflict between those in power and the common masses of laborers and the poor
shocking life of sweatshops and urban poor is highlighted in literature to insist on reform
country versus city life
sexual discretion (or lack of it)
strained coincidences
romantic triangles
heroines in physical danger
aristocratic villains
misdirected letters


bigamous marriages

Genres/Styles:
novel becomes popular for first time; mass produced for the first time
bildungsroman: coming of age
political novels
detective novels: (Sherlock Holmes)
serialized novels
elegies
poetry: easier to understand
o dramatic monologues
drama: comedies of manners
magazines offer stories to the masses

Effect:
literature begins to reach the masses

Historical Context:
paper becomes cheap; magazines and novels cheap to mass produce
unprecedented growth of industry and business in Britain
unparalleled dominance of nations, economies and trade abroad

Charles Dickens,
Thomas Hardy ,
Rudyard Kipling,
Robert Louis Stevenson,
George Eliot,
Oscar Wilde,
Alfred Lord Tennyson,
Darwin,
Charlotte Bronte,
Robert Browning

Modern/Post Modern Period of Literature
Years: 1900-1980

Content:
lonely individual fighting to find peace and comfort in a world that has lost its absolute values and traditions
man is nothing except what he makes of himself
a belief in situational ethicsno absolute values. Decisions are based on the situation one is involved in at the
moment
mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader
loss of the hero in literature
destruction made possible by technology

Genres/Styles:
poetry: free verse
epiphanies begin to appear in literature
speeches


memoir
novels
stream of consciousness
detached, unemotional, humorless
present tense
magic realism

Effect:
an approach to life: Seize life for the moment and get all you can out of it.

Historical Context:
British Empire loses 1 million soldiers to World War I
Winston Churchill leads Britain through WW II, and the Germans bomb England directly
British colonies demand independence

James Joyce,
Joseph Conrad,
D.H. Lawrence,
Graham Greene,
Dylan Thomas,
Nadine Gordimer,
George Orwell,
William Butler Yeats,
Bernard Shaw

Contemporary Period of Literature (Post Modern Period Continued)
1980-Present

Content:
concern with connections between people
exploring interpretations of the past
open-mindedness and courage that comes from being an outsider
escaping those ways of living that blind and dull the human spirit

Genres/Styles:
all genres represented
fictional confessional/diaries
50% of contemporary fiction is written in the first person
narratives: both fiction and nonfiction
emotion-provoking
humorous irony
storytelling emphasized
autobiographical essays
mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader

Effect:
too soon to tell


Historical Context:
a world growing smaller due to ease of communications between societies
a world launching a new beginning of a century and a millennium
media culture interprets values and events for individuals

Seamus Heaney,
Doris Lessing,
Louis de Bernieres,
Kazuo Ishiguro,
Tom Stoppard,
Salman Rushdie,
John Le Carre,
Ken Follett



Periods of World Literature
Adapted from: http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/periods_of_literature.html

EARLY PERIODS

These periods are spans of time in which literature shared intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences. In the
Western tradition, the early periods of literary history are roughly as follows below:
A. THE CLASSICAL PERIOD (1200 BCE-455 CE)
I. HOMERIC or HEROIC PERIOD (1200-800 BCE) Greek legends are passed along orally, including Homer's
The Iliad and The Odyssey. This is a chaotic period of warrior-princes, wandering sea-traders, and fierce pirates.
II CLASSICAL GREEK PERIOD (800-200 BCE) Greek writers and philosophers such as Gorgias, Aesop. Plato,
Socrates, Aristotle, Euripides, and Sophocles. The fifth century (499-400 BCE) in particular is renowned as The
Golden Age of Greece. This is the sophisticated period of the polls, or individual City-State, and early democracy.
Some of the world's finest art, poetry, drama, architecture, and philosophy originate in Athens.
III. CLASSICAL ROMAN PERIOD (200 BCE-455 CE) Greece's culture gives way to Roman power when Rome
conquers Greece in 146 CE. The Roman Republic was traditionally founded in 509 BCE, but it is limited in size
until later. Playwrights of this time include Plautus and Terence. After nearly 500 years as a Republic, Rome slides
into dictatorship under Julius Caesar and finally into a monarchial empire under Caesar Augustus in 27 CE. This
later period is known as the Roman Imperial period. Roman writers include Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. Roman
philosophers include Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius. Roman rhetoricians include Cicero and Quintilian.
IV. PATRISTIC PERIOD (c. 70 AD-455 CE) Early Christian writings such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Saint
Cyprian, Saint Ambrose and Saint Jerome. This is the period in which Saint Jerome first compiled the Bible, when
Christianity spread across Europe, and the Roman Empire suffered its dying convulsions. In this period, barbarians
attack Rome in 410 AD and the city finally falls to them completely in 455 CE.
B. THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD (455 CE-1485 CE)
I. THE OLD ENGLISH (ANGLO-SAXON) PERIOD (428-l066 )
The so-called "Dark Ages" (455 CE -799 CE) occur when Rome falls and barbarian tribes move into Europe. Franks,
Ostrogoths, Lombards, and Goths settle in the ruins of Europe and the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes migrate to
Britain, displacing native Celts into Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Early Old English poems such as Beowulf The
Wanderer, and The Seafarer originate sometime late in the Anglo-Saxon period.
The Carolingian Renaissance (800- 850 CE) emerges in Europe. In central Europe, texts include early medieval
grammars, encyclopedias, etc. In northern Europe, this time period marks the setting of Viking sagas.
II. THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (c. 1066-1450)
In 1066, Norman French armies invade and conquer England under William I. This marks the end of the Anglo-
Saxon hierarchy and the emergence of the Twelfth Century Renaissance (c. 1100-1200 CE). French chivalric
romances--such as works by Chretien de Troyes--and French fables--such as the works of Marie de France and
Jean de Mean -spread in popularity- Abelard and other humanists produce great scholastic and theological
works.
Late or "High" Medieval Period (c. 1200-1485 CE): This often tumultuous period is marked by the Middle English
writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the "Gawain" or "Pearl" Poet, the Wakefield Master, and William Langland.
Other writers include Italian and French authors like Boccaccio, Petrarch, Dante, Christine de Pisan.
C. THE RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION (C. 1485-1660 CE)
(The Renaissance takes place in the late 15th, 16th, and early 17th century in Britain, but somewhat earlier in Italy
and the southern Europe, somewhat later in northern Europe.)
I. Early Tudor Period (1485-1558): The War of the Roses ends in England with Henry Tudor (Henry VII claiming
the throne. Martin Luther's split with Rome marks the emergence of Protestantism, followed by Henry VIII's
Anglican schism, which creates the first Protestant church in England. Edmond Spencer is a sample poet
II. Elizabethan Period (1555-1603): Queen Elizabeth saves England from both Spanish invasion and internal
squabbles at home- Her reign is marked by the early work of S Marlowe, Kydd, and Sidney


III. Jacobean Period (1603-1625): Shakespeare's later work, Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, John Donne.
IV. Caroline Age (1625-1649): John Milton, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, the "Sons of Ben" and others write
during the reign of Charles I and his Cavaliers.
V. Commonwealth Period or Puritan Interregnum (1649-1660): Under Cromwell's Puritan dictatorship, we find
writers like Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Browne.
LATER PERIODS OF LITERATURE
These periods are spans of time in which literature shared intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences. In the
Western tradition, the later periods of literary history are roughly as follows below:
D. THE ENLIGHTENMENT (NEOCLASSICAL) PERIOD (C. 1660-1790)
"Neoclassical" refers to the increased influence of Classical literature upon these centuries. The Neoclassical Period
is also called the "Enlightenment" due to the increased reverence for logic and disdain for superstition. The period is
marked by the rise of Deism, intellectual backlash against earlier Puritanism, and America's revolution against
England.

I. Restoration Period (c. 1660-1700): This period marks the British king's restoration to the throne after a long
period of Puritan domination in England. Its symptoms include the dominance of French and Classical
influences on poetry and drama. Sample writers include John Dryden, John Lock, Sir William Temple, and
Samuel Pepys, and Aphra Behn in England. Abroad, representative authors include Jean Racine and Moliere.
II. The Augustan Age (c. 1700-1750): This period is marked by the imitation of Virgil and Horace's literature in
English letters. The principle English writers include Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope. Abroad,
Voltaire is the dominant French writer.
III. The Age of Johnson (c. 1750-1790): This period marks the transition toward the upcoming Romanticism
though the period is still largely neoclassical. Major writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and
Edward Gibbon who represent the Neoclassical tendencies, while writers like Robert Burns, Thomas Gray,
Cowper, and Crabbe show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal. In America, this period is called
the Colonial Period. It includes colonial and revolutionary writers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and
Thomas Paine.
E. ROMANTIC PERIOD (C. 1790-1830)
Romantic poets wrote about nature and the imagination in England_ Some Romantics include Coleridge, Blake,
Keats, and Shelley in Britain and Johann von Goethe in Germany. In America, this period is called the
Transcendental Period. Transcendentalists include Emerson and Thoreau. Gothic writings, (c. 1790-1890) overlap
with the Romantic and Victorian periods. Writers of Gothic novels (the precursor to horror novels) include
Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and Victorians like Bram Stoker in Britain. In America, Gothic writers include Poe and
Hawthorne.

F. VICTORIAN PERIOD AND THE 19TH CENTURY (C. 1832-1901)
Writing during the period of Queen Victoria's reign includes sentimental novels. British writers include Browning,
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and Jane Austen.
Pre- Raphaelites like the Rossettis and William Morris, idealize and long for the morality of the medieval world. The
end of the Victorian Period marked by intellectual movements of Asceticism and "the Decadence" in writings of
Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In America, Naturalist writers like Stephen Crane flourish, as do early free verse poets
like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
G. MODERN PERIOD (C. 1914-1945)
In Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, In
America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen, and Flannery O'Connor as well as the famous
writers of The Lost Generation (also called the writers of The Jazz Age, 1914-1929) such as Hemingway, Stein,
Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. "The Harlem Renaissance" marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison.
H. POSTMODERN PERIOD (C. 1945 ONWARD)


T. S. Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, Ginsberg, Pynchon, and other modern writers,
poets, and playwrights experiment with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Multiculturalism leads to increasing
canonization of non-Caucasian writers such as Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neal Hurston. Magic
Realists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier Gunter Grass, and Salman Rushdie flourish
with surrealistic writings embroidered in the conventions of realism.



XV. Writing About Prose: A Student
Handbook



Poor Example

Strays from topic
The predominant device Updike utilizes is point of view. By telling the story through Sammys words and not an
outsiders, his characteristics and ideas are directly revealed to the reader [he directly reveals Sammys characteristics and
ideas]. For example, he envisions a party at Queenies home where people are dressed well while drinking martinis and
picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big glass plate. In contrast, he has only experienced parties where
Schlitz in tall glasses with Theyll Do It Every Time cartoons stencilled [sic] on is served. This reveals his own lack
of wealth. Sammy is also nave and disrepectful.
In many stories, the central aspect of the story is revealed through the thoughts and actions of the main
character. The reader may be enlightened about the feelings of that character through the authors choice of the usage
of certain stylistic devices. The character of Sammy in John Updikes A&P is one such character. The reader is
enlightened of the feelings portrayed at the end of the story through the development of Sammys character. Style, point
of view, figurative language, are used to develop the character of Sammy in John Updikes A&P.
John Updikes style, as portrayed in A&P, is extremely important to the overall effect of the story. He uses
simple diction, since the story is told by a nineteen-year-old boy who has not been well educated. This diction is
illustrated in the passage records at discount of the Carribean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you
wonder they waste the wax on. His use of slang, like sweet broad soft looking can, in reference to the chubby girls
derrier, help to reveal the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the narrator. Another such aspect of the style is figurative
language.
Figurative language is an important device which can be found in the story A&P. .Though his choice of
vocabulary and experience is rather limited, it is easy to see that Sammy thinks very highly of the girl.The figurative
language in the story would not be as easily passed without the point of view of the story.
Through the quote when my parents.



Writing About Prose
Adapted from: http://www.auroraweb.com/homework/AP12/ap12_syllabus.htm

The Nature of Fiction
Any experience in daily life, usual or unusual, is a story. A child in a hurry to catch a bus to school falls and
breaks an arm. That is a story. An elevator breaks down, stops running between floors and imprisons four people for
two hours. That, too, is a story. But these incidents are not short stories. A short story is a literary form. It requires some
special doing to give it shape. An incident, whether related by word of mouth, or printed, if it is newsworthy, in a
newspaper is raw, basically untreated experience. It becomes a short story when it is treated by a writer. This involves
selection from the raw experiences those that best fit a conception in the mind of the writer; it requires emphases on and
elaborations and contractions of experiences; it needs delineation and particularizing of character; and it demands the
creation of a world in which the events occur. In addition, the raw experiences of life are fictionalized; that is, the
writer changes events, characters, and world to fit his view of life and his purpose in telling the story. In the hands of a
skilled writer however, the changes do not distort life; they give form and meaning to life. The events, characters, and
places acquire a verisimilitude, a truth to life, that arouses a sense of recognition in the reader and an acknowledgment
that what is portrayed is so.

The Form and Structure of Fiction
It is not always easy to tell the difference between the short story and the novel. One difference has to do with length.
The short story can be read swiftly. Another difference deals with subject. A short story concentrates on one central
incident or one central character study. However, how does one characterize the long short stories or the short novels?
Terms like novella and novelette are used to describe such works. The best way to judge the difference between short
story and novel and at the same time to determine the tone or spirit of the work is to use the following guides:

Let us use a quadrilateral figure to represent a work of fiction The story begins at a point in human experience; the
reader becomes involved in the experiences, motivated by the skill of the writer in creating interest and suspense; the
reader is led to the climax or resolution of the problems or conflicts in the story; and the story is brought to a close.
Sometimes the story ends at the climax; sometimes a few loose ends are quickly gathered together; sometimes a long


explanation is necessary to conclude the story. Sometimes a new experience is introduced related to the events preceding
it, showing the results of the climactic event or explaining how the climactic event came to be. Sometimes a new series
of events flows from the climax and culminates in a new climax. These are the shapes stories may take.

The story ends at the climax.

Some loose ends need to be gathered after the climax.

A long explanation follows after the climax.
rising
action
climax
rising
action
climax
rising
action
climax


A second series of events follows the climax of the
first series and culminates in a concluding climax.

If a third series of incidents needs to be added to expand further the events leading to the first climax or to recount the
effects produced by the events leading to the first climax, we have moved into the realm of the novel. A typical novel is
a series of experiences happening to a central character or group of central characters, each of which culminates in a
climactic event. The final climactic event resolves the conflicts and the dilemmas of the characters and brings the novel
to a close. The shape it takes would be the following:

The Modes of Fiction
The quadrilaterals may also be used to clarify certain critical classifications of novels. The experiences in serious novels
may be described as good or bad. Let us use a quadrilateral this time to represent the experiences of life and let us divide
the experiences into those that depict mans goodness and those that depict mans malevolence. We will divide the
quadrilateral in half though we recognize that life is never exactly half good and half evil.

rising
action
climax climax
rising
action

action
climax climax climax climax
Final
Resolution

action action action action
rising
action
rising
action


Writing that deals with both the good and bad
experiences in the lives of his characters or tells it as
it is is realistic.

Writing that exposes evil in the world is naturalistic or
satirical. Naturalistic writers are aware of evil and
describe it in all its ugliness.

Writing that portrays man as good and is capable of
friendship, love, sacrifice, nobility, honor, devotion,
patriotism, dedication or heroism is romantic. There
will be evil forces to threaten the hero, but the hero
will triumph over evil of face doom courageously.

The Worlds of Fiction
You will encounter in your reading of fiction many varied worlds, real and unreal.
Below are five types of worlds you may encounter in your readings:
Everyday experience
These stories concern themselves with family life, with birth, growth, love,
marriage, age, and death. They will deal with school, with other places of learning,
with work and recreation, with moments of excitement and days of dullness, with
heroism and cowardice. (Sons and Lovers by Lawrence and Araby by Joyce)
Economic extremes These stories, which we look at from the outside, portray the world of great
Good

Evil
Romanticism
Good

Evil
Naturalism
or
Satire
Good

Evil
realism


power and wealth and the world of soul-starving poverty. We view royalty and
the rich and see what values govern their lives; we learn how the poor and
disinherited of the earth struggle to survive and how their values are eroded.
(Faulkners As I Lay Dying, Steinbecks The Pearl)
Dramatic world
These stories concern the malignant forces of nature or the innate evil in man and
turn the universe into a battleground for survival. It is a restless, anxious world,
one in which man faces the slings and arrows of storms, floods, famine, war,
revolution and crime. Caught up in a maelstrom of events he cannot control, man
fights for survival, using all the powers of arm and mind granted him by nature.
His values are shaped by two basic drives, to stay alive and protect those who
depend upon him. He will defy God and state and betray values to remain alive
and keep those near him safe. (Flowering Judas by Porter and Hamlet by
Shakespeare
sick world
These stories deal with people and places gone awry. The atmosphere and the
action are ugly, weird, strange, supernatural, shocking. The people are
maladjusted, perverted, insane, suicidal, retarded. It is the world of idiots, drug
addicts, pimps, prostitutes, sexual perverts, criminals, lunatics. It is a dark world
where evil triumphs seizing at the weakness in man and converting him into a
monstrous being preying on others and on himself. Sometimes the evil growth-
forces in nature produce a pathetic misfit, incapable of governing his life, trying
desperately to comprehend his nature and his world and failing because
comprehension is beyond him. (The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner,
Metamorphisis by Kafka)
Fantasy
This world is an unreal one in which dreams unattainable in the real world are
often fulfilled. It is a romantic world in which characters might be united in death
(Heathcliff and Cathy from Wuthering Heights) or the Walter Mittys are daredevil
heroes.


It is also often a satiric world created by writers to expose the evils of the real
world. (Swifts Gullivers Travels, Voltaires Candide, Huxelys Brave New World,
Orwells 1984, or Goldings Lord of the Flies) Everything is possible in a world of
fantasy.

Reading and Analyzing
In analyzing a short story or a novel, you should determine carefully the following elements:
1. Your first concern should be the world of the work. You should seek the answers to the following questions:
In what kind of community does the action occur? What are the customs, the beliefs, and the values of the
community? What is sacred in this society and what is held in scorn? What forms of behavior and response are
expected from those who live within its boundaries? What patterns are considered atypical and therefore
suspect? What institutions exist in this society and how effectively are they functioning? What disagreements
and conflicts exist among the different members of this society? Are there struggles? What forms do these
struggles take? Are they open or secret?
As you read the work and determine the character of its world, you will be making judgments about it,
first in terms of your own personal values and then in terms of esthetic, philosophical, and moral values which
prevail in the world in which you live.
2. In each of the worlds revealed to you in the literary work, you will find a number of people, the characters in
the story. These people will have been affected in some way by the patterns, customs, and beliefs of this world.
Their values, their relationships, their views, their actions, their successes, their failures, their adjustments, their
frustrationsall these will be colored by the atmosphere in which they live, by the spoken and unspoken
demands made upon them. You need to analyze the inherent personalities of the characters. You need to
examine their relationships with one another and their actions and thoughts in response to the demands of
these relationships and to the demands of the community. You should seek to determine the motives of their
actions, especially in terms of what they are and what they hope to be or to achieve. You should be able to
judge how they see themselves and how they are seen by others and determine how the narrator or author wish


you to see them. By means of this analysis you should try, if possible, to arrive at a conception of the authors
view of the world he has created and of his purpose in writing the story.
3. Every work of fiction has a narrator. When a story is told in the first person, it is velar that the narrator is not
the author and that he may or may not be presenting the authors view. Most often, he will not. But when the
story is told in the third person, then it becomes a problem to learn who is telling the story. The narrator may
be the author, but often he is not, and there is danger of misinterpretation in ascribing to the author the views
and attitudes of the narrator. You will need to study carefully the manner in which the narrator tells the story,
the extent to which he moves into the minds of the characters, the kinds of comments he makes about their
thoughts and actions, the view he has of the world in which the characters move, the range and completeness
of his knowledge. You will need also to ascertain whether the narrator is a character in the story or an external
observer and recorder. In other words, you will need to find out the distance between author and narrator and
between character and narrator. This will also help you to comprehend more thoroughly the structure of a
work, the view of the author, and his purpose in writing the story.
4. You will notice that the authors view will be reflected in the tone that pervades the work. Look for this and see
whether you can put it into words. Study also the language and imagery used by the author and the way he
manages his scenes. See whether you can determine the tone from these. You should be able to detect satire,
irony, humor, sentimentality, detachment, foreboding, fancy, melancholy, etc. and you should be able to refer
to passages to illustrate your conclusions.
5. A story, as you know, is a representation of life. The author has selected an experience or series of experiences
out of the vast context of life and has put them into an art form. Once he has done this, he has added a
dimension to this thing called life. He has given it form and a semblance of order, characteristics we may find
in the world of nature through scientific investigation but which we rarely find in the blind groping of man to
explain himself and his relationship to others and to the universe in which he finds himself for a short while.
The writer abstracts life and fives it form. This form has unity and a coherence in that the parts selected by the
authorthe world, the action, the characters, the theme, the language, the imageryall combine to produce an
artistic structure. How the author of each of the works you study achieves this or fails to do this will be another
of the subjects to concern us in our study of fiction.



Writing Literary Essays: An Overview

Purpose of Writing Literary Essays
Writing is the sharpened, focused expression of thought and study. As you develop your writing skills, you also
improve your perceptions and increase your critical faculties.
Characteristics of Good Writing
Writing begins with the search for something to sayan idea. Not all ideas are equal; some are better than
others, and getting good ideas is an ability that you develop the more you think and write.
Unlike class discussion and conversation, writing must stick with great determination to a specific point.
A finished draft is one that someone might believe was always perfect, when much thought and work went into
it.
The Process
(Reminder: You are never committed to anything you write down. You can always revise it, rework it, or go a whole
new direction.)
1. Invention and Prewriting
a. Reading and Thinking About the Work
i. Take notes focused on your assignment
ii. Use the study questions in your text, if it has such questions
iii. Use a pen, pencil, or word processor as an extension of your thought.
b. Examine all of this and Develop Central Idea(s)
i. Brainstorming from your notes (listing and writing sentences)
ii. Develop your observations (writing paragraphs)
c. Determine your Central Idea (choose the best)
d. Create a Thesis Statement
2. Draft the Essay
a. Develop an Outline (using a scratch outline is great practice for the exam)
b. Flesh out (use) your Outline


i. Central idea and Thesis Statement form Introduction
ii. Topic sentences begin Body Paragraphs
3. Revisions as Necessary
4. Proofreading


General Questions to Consider in Analyzing Literature
Overview

1. (Point of View/Narrator) Who is telling the story? How much does he know? To what extent is his vision or
knowledge limited? Is the storyteller the author or is he a narrator created by the author? How much distance is
there between the author and the narrator? How does the point of view affect the readers understanding of
plot, character and theme?
2. (Plot/Structure) What are the raw facts of the story? How has the author embellished the raw facts? Identify
the complications, conflicts, rising action and climax.
3. (Symbolism) What objects or people appear in the story to represent more than their basic elements or reality?
What, in your view, do they represent?
4. (Theme) What purpose does the author have in telling the story? What are his intentions? How do you
determine what his intentions are? Are his intentions clear or must they be inferred from the details and the
emphases of the story?
5. (Character) What is the authors view of his characters? How do you know this? How do the characters view
one another? How do you know this?
6. (Tone) What is the authors view of life? What evidence in the story supports your conclusions about the
authors philosophy?
7. (Theme/Tone) What is the world of the story? Is it a real or an unreal one? What are the basic values that
govern this world? How do these values affect the actions, beliefs, decisions of the characters? What is the
authors view of this world?



General Questions for Analysis and Evaluation of Literature
Adapted from: Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense by Lawrence Perine

PLOT
Who is the protagonist of the story?
What are the conflicts?
Are they physical, intellectual, moral, or emotional?
Is the main conflict between forces sharply differentiated as good and evil, or is it more subtle and
complex?
Does the plot have unity?
Are all the episodes relevant to the total meaning or effect of the story?
Does each incident grow logically out of the preceding incident and lead naturally to the next?
Is the ending happy, unhappy, or indeterminate?
Is it fairly achieved?
What use does the story make of chance and coincidence? Are these occurrences used to initiate, to
complicate, or to resolve the story?
How improbable are they?
How is suspense created in the story?
Is the interest confined to "What happens next?" or are larger concerns involved?
Can you find examples of mystery? Of dilemma?
What use does the story make of surprise?
Are the surprises achieved fairly?
Do they serve a significant purpose? Do they divert the reader's attention from weaknesses in the story?
To what extent is this a "formula" story?

CHARACTERS
What means does the author use to reveal character?
Are the characters sufficiently dramatized?
What use is made of character contrasts?
Are the characters consistent in their actions? Adequately motivated? Plausible?
Does the author successfully avoid stock characters?
Is each character fully enough developed to justify its role in the story?
Are the main characters round or flat?
Are any of the characters a developing character?
If so, is the change a large or a small one?
Is it a plausible change for such a person?
Is it sufficiently motivated?
Is it given sufficient time?

THEME
Does the story have a theme? What is it? Is it implicit or explicit?
Does the theme reinforce or oppose popular notions of life? Does it furnish a new insight or refresh or
deepen an old theme?

POINT OF VIEW
What point of view does the story use?


Is it consistent in its use of this point of view?
If shifts are made, are they justified?
What advantages has the chosen point of view?
Does it furnish any clues as to the purpose of the story?
If the point of view is that of one of the characters, does this character have any limitations that affect his
interpretation of events or persons?
Does the author use point of view primarily to reveal or conceal?
Is important information known to the focal character ever unfairly withheld?

SYMBOL AND IRONY
Does the story make use of symbols?
If so, do the symbols carry or merely reinforce the meaning of the story?
Does the story anywhere utilize irony of situation? Dramatic irony? Verbal irony?
What functions do the ironies serve?

EMOTION AND HUMOR
Does the story aim directly at an emotional effect, or is emotion merely its natural by-product?
Is the emotion sufficiently dramatized?
Is the author anywhere guilty of sentimentality?

FANTASY
Does the story employ fantasy?
If so, what is the initial assumption?
Does the story operate logically from this assumption?
Is the fantasy employed for its own sake or to express some human truth? If the latter, what truth?

GENERAL
Is the primary interest of the story in plot, character, theme, or some other element?
What contribution to the story is made by its setting?
Is the particular setting essential, or could the story have happened anywhere?
What are the characteristics of the author's style? Are they appropriate to the nature of the story?
What light is thrown on the story by its title?
Do all the elements of the story work together to support a central purpose?
Is any part irrelevant or inappropriate?
What do you conceive to be the story's central purpose?
How fully has it achieved that purpose?
Does the story offer chiefly escape or interpretation?
How significant is the story's purpose?
Does the story gain or lose on a second reading?


Suggestions about Writing a Prose Passage for the C Test

Adapted from: Casson, Allan. English Literature and Composition: Preparation Guide. (Cliffs Notes-ISBN0-8220-
2305-9)
Nadel, Max. How to Prepare for the Advanced Placement Examination in English. (Barrons-ISBN 0-8120-2992-5)
Rozakis, Laurie. Exam in English: Literature and Composition. (ARCO-ISBN 0-13-011629-7)

1. Make sure you understand the questions and that you answer all parts of the question in your essay. When
reading the scoring guide for this question, I have noted that the best essays answers all parts of the question
while the poorer essay neglect to address one or two parts of the questions.

2. One good way to prepare for this part of the Exam is to become familiar with questions from previous prose
passage questions. Make sure you understand the terminology.

3. Do not be in a hurry to begin writing. A well-thought-out, well-organized, and specific essay of three
paragraphs will score higher than a disorganized and repetitive essay two or three times as long.

4. I would avoid long introductory paragraphs that merely repeat the question or outline what you will do in the
next three paragraphs. a final paragraph that only repeats what you have already said is not necessary. If you
answer the question the exam has put, you dont need a cute title, a dramatic opening, or a snazzy close.

5. The question often asks you to identify an attitude, a state of mind, or a tone. A common mistake is the
assumption that the answer requires only one word, that there is only one attitude, one state of mind, or one
tone. More often than not, the best answer is the one that sees complexity or a change. The good student sees
that, though an author endorses a character or a position, he or she may do so with reservations. Chances are,
if the answer is too simple, youre missing something. On the essay exams, if an answer is obvious, everyone
will get it right, and the readers will be unable to discriminate among the papers.

6. Almost every prose passage questions begins with the injunction Read the following passage carefully. Obey
this order. All your care in understanding what the question asks you to do is useless if you dont read the
passage well enough to give convincing answers.

7. Separate narrator from author and from character.

8. Try to determine whether there is a relationship between narrator and character, and, if so, what its nature is.

9. Study the behavior, actions, thoughts, and words of the characters to determine their states and their reactions
to where they are and with whom they are or with whom they are near.

10. Scrutinize the language and the imagery for the narrators attitude, for the characters attitudes, for tone, and
for revelations of unexpressed emotions and thoughts.

11. Dig beneath the surface of statements for insights into true feelings.

12. Observe the environment and the way it is seen for further comprehension of problems, relationships, and
feelings. How characters perceive their worlds will tell you who they are and what is moving them.

13. The most common question on the prose passage will ask you to read a prose selection and discuss how the
authors style reveals the theme of the work. You will be expected to consider various elements of style such as
tone, diction, figurative language, sentence length and variety, detail, and so forth. This means that you will
have to take the passage apart and look at each section very carefully and then put it back together and


reconsider the meaning.

14. Organization is important, and you should plan how you will organize your essay about a prose passage. There
is no right or wrong way of organization. What the reader looks for is organization. Some students organize
their paragraphs around the items from the question while others divide the passage into sections and discuss
that section in terms of the question.

15. You should include in your essay specific examples from the passage that support the points you are making.
Again, the readers are not looking for a magic number of examples, but they are looking for essays that are
adequately developed. Remember when you quote from the passage to enclose the quoted material within
quotation marks. You may include the line numbers but that is not necessary. The quoted material should fit
smoothly into your own prose. If you change the quoted prose to fit your prose, the change is indicated in
brackets [ ]. You may also use the ellipsis (three periods . . .) to indicate that you have omitted words in the
quotation. Avoid overuse of the ellipsis.


Essay Preparation

The MLA Handbook serves as the designated guide for the writing assignments. Teachers evaluate students writing
samples by using a set of carefully constructed practices of composition and documentation. Most particularly, Phyllis
Franklin writes in the forward to the MLA Handbook that it provides a comprehensive picture of how research papers
are created. While the primary goal of this source is a students successful completion of a research paper, it also
provides useful information in the matters of form and style for other types of composition.

Margins

Except for page numbers, leave margins of one inch at the top and bottom and on both sides of the text.
Indent the first word of a paragraph one-half inch (or five spaces from the left margin).
Indent set-off quotations one inch (or ten spaces) from the left margin.

Spacing

A composition must be double-spaced throughout, including quotations, notes, and the list of works cited.
In a written paper, skip every other ruled line.

Title Page

Do not use a title page

Page One: Heading and Title

Beginning one inch from the top of the first page and flush with the left margin, type your name, your instructors name,
essay title, and the date on separate lines, double-spacing between the lines.
Double-space again and center the title.
Double-space also between the lines of the title.
Do not underline your title, put it in quotation marks, or type it in all capital letters.
Underline only the words that you would underline in the text.
Capitalize the first words and all other words in the title except articles (a, and, or the), prepositions (to, with, in, on,
etc.), and conjunctions (and, but, or, not, etc.).
Do not use punctuation marks after the title unless a question mark or an exclamation point is needed.

Specific Directions for Handwritten Papers

Write only on the front of a page.
Use 8 x 11 inch lined, white paper with clean edges no frazzles.
Follow the MLA Handbook for form and style.
Use blue or black ink for all final drafts.
Be neat and write legibly.
Keep a copy of the paper.
Specific Directions for Typed Papers
o Type only on the front of a page.
o Use 8 x 11 inch paper of good quality.
o Use a high quality printer.
o Choose a standard, easily readable typeface 12 point Times New Roman is preferred.
o Turn off the automatic hyphenation feature.
o Keep a backup copy on disk.


Body of Composition

Double-space between the title and the first line of the text.
Indent all paragraphs five letter spaces.
At the end of a line, hyphenate words only between syllables. Do not carry over endings like ed, -ing, etc.

Page Numbers

Number all page numbers consecutively throughout the research paper in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch
from the top and flush with the right margin.
Begin pagination on Page 1 of the composition and continue numbering through the last page, including the Works
Cited page when one is needed.
Type your last name before the page number, as a precaution in case of misplaced pages.
Do not use the abbreviation p. before a page number or add a period, a hyphen, or any other mark or symbol.
Position the first line of text one inch from the top of the page.

Proof Reading

Proofread your finished product carefully for omitted words and other errors. Make the necessary corrections in your
final, clean copy.
Do not use the margins or write a change below the line it affects.
If any corrections on any page are numerous or substantial, retype or rewrite that page.

Binding

Use only staples to secure your papers. DO NOT USE PLASTIC BINDERS.


General Composition Reminders

Create a topic sentence for a paragraph or a thesis statement for an essay.
Never write phrases like In this paper I will show or I think.
Determine the best method(s) of support for your writing assignment such as facts, statistics, examples, definition,
analogy, process, cause and effect.
Avoid passive voice, sentence fragments, and subject-verb disagreement.
Use only second person pronoun references in process papers or how-to papers.
Never put a comma before the subordinating conjunction because.
When you have written the conjunction and, consider what you have joined together:
o --just two words, phrases, or subordinate clauses use no comma.
o --three or more words, phrases, or subordinate clauses, use a comma to separate each item in the series.
o --two independent clauses, use a comma before and or any of the coordinating conjunctions (but, or, not for,
so, yet).
Use a comma after introductory words such as First, Next, Therefore, In addition, etc., introductory participial phrases
(Running down the stairs, the little girl fell.); introductory adverb clauses beginning subordinate conjunctions (Since,
When, If, Because, etc.).
Only use a comma between adjectives of EQUAL RANK! This means two words can be reversed without any change
in the meaning.
Do not run together independent clauses. Use a comma and a coordinating conjunction, a semicolon, or a period and a
capital letter to join independent clauses.
Avoid beginning your sentences with so, but, or and. These words are conjunctions, not transitional words.
Check for subject-verb agreement and for pronoun-antecedent agreement.
Write in a consistent tense. For example, if you begin a paper in present tense, do not shift to past tense verbs later in
the paper.

Literary-based Compositions

In the writing of an analytical paper, support your topic sentence or thesis statement by using direct quotes from the
text, references to specifics in the narrative, and/or quotes or paraphrases from secondary sources.
Avoid plot summaries. Do not retell the story. Use specific examples to support points you have already established.
Introduce all direct quotes smoothly and include the page on which the passage appears in the text. Note that the page
number is in the parentheses at the end of the sentence before the period.
Use formal language. Avoid slang terms, sexist language, and clichs.
Use literary present tense throughout the composition except for direct quotations, which may be in the past tense.
After first mention of the authors name or the authoritys name, use that individuals last name only.
Do not confuse the author with the speaker.
Do not use first person references such as I think or I believe.
Each body paragraph should have a topic sentence that deals with only one main idea.
Create an original title; do not use the authors title.

Avoid statements that are too obvious:

The Monkeys Paw is a short story.
Joe is a character.
This story is very interesting .
I feel as if.
_____ is a prime example of ____.


Do not add anything to the text or to the authority.


College Writing
Adapted from: http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/

What this handout is about...
This handout will help you figure out what your college instructors expect when they give you a writing assignment. It
will tell you how and why to move beyond the five-paragraph themes you learned to write in high school and start
writing essays that are more analytical and more flexible.
What is a five-paragraph theme?
Public school teachers sometimes call writing assignments a "five-paragraph theme"; in other places, it's a "keyhole
essay." Either way, it's hourglass-shaped: it begins and ends with something general, and it narrows down in the middle
to discuss specifics, and then branches out to more general comments at the end. In a classic five-paragraph theme, the
first paragraph starts with a general statement and ends with a thesis statement containing three "points"; each body
paragraph discusses one of those "points" in turn; and the final paragraph sums up what the student has written.
Why do high schools teach the five-paragraph theme?
The five-paragraph theme is a good way to learn how to write an academic essay. It's a simplified version of academic
writing that requires you to state an idea and support it with evidence. Setting a limit of five paragraphs narrows your
options and forces you to master the basics of organization. Furthermore-and for many high school teachers, this is the
crucial issue-many state-mandated end-of-grade writing tests, exams, and the SAT II writing test reward writers who
follow the five-paragraph theme format.
Writing a five-paragraph theme is like riding a bicycle with training wheels; it's a device that helps you learn. That doesn't
mean you should use it forever. Once you can write well without it, you can cast it off and never look back.
Why don't five-paragraph themes work well for college writing?
The way college instructors teach is different from high school, and so is what they expect from you.
While high school courses tend to focus on the who, what, when, and where of the things you study-just the facts,
ma'am-college courses ask you to think about the how and the why. You can do very well in high school by studying
hard and memorizing a lot of facts. Although college instructors still expect you to know the facts, they really care about
how you analyze and interpret those facts and why you think those facts matter. Once you know what college instructors
are looking for, you can see some of the reasons why five-paragraph themes don't work so well for college writing:
Five-paragraph themes often do a poor job of setting up a framework, or context, that helps the reader
understand what the author is trying to say. Students learn in high school that their introduction should begin
with something general. College instructors call these "dawn of time" introductions. For example, a student
asked to discuss the causes of the Hundred Years War might begin, "Since the dawn of time, humankind has
been plagued by war." The student will fare better with a more concrete sentence directly related to what you
are going to say in the rest of the paper-for example, a sentence such as "In the early 14th century, a civil war
broke out in Flanders that would soon threaten Western Europe's balance of power." If you are accustomed to


writing vague opening lines and need them to get started, go ahead and write them, but delete them before you
turn in the final draft. For more on this subject, see our handout Introductions.
Five-paragraph themes often lack an argument. Because college courses focus on analyzing and interpreting
rather than on memorizing, college instructors expect writers not only to know the facts but also to make an
argument about the facts. The best five-paragraph themes may do this. However, the typical five-paragraph
theme has a "listing" thesis e.g. "I will show how the Romans lost their empire in Britain and Gaul by
examining military technology, religion, and politics," rather than an argumentative one, e.g. "The Romans lost
their empire in Britain and Gaul because their opponents' military technology caught up with their own at the
same time as religious upheaval and political conflict were weakening the sense of common purpose on the
home front." For more on this subject, see our handout Effective Academic Writing: The Argument.
Five-paragraph themes are often repetitive. Writers who follow the model tend to repeat sentences or phrases
from the introduction in topic sentences for paragraphs, rather than writing topic sentences that tie their three
"points" together into a coherent argument. Repetitive writing doesn't help to move an argument along, and it's
no fun to read.
Five-paragraph themes often lack "flow;" that is, they don't make smooth transitions from one thought to the
next. The "listing" thesis statement encourages writers to treat each paragraph and its main idea as a separate
entity, rather than to draw connections between paragraphs and ideas in order to develop an argument.
Five-paragraph themes often have weak conclusions that merely summarize what's gone before and don't say
anything new or interesting. In our handout on Conclusions, we call these "that's my story and I'm sticking to
it" conclusions: they do nothing to engage readers and make them glad they read the essay. Most of us can
remember an introduction and three body paragraphs without a repetitive summary at the end to help us out.
Five-paragraph themes don't have any counterpart in the real world. Read your favorite newspaper or
magazine; look through the readings your professors assign you; listen to political speeches or sermons. Can
you find anything that looks or sounds like a five-paragraph theme? One of the important skills that college can
teach you, above and beyond the subject matter of any particular course, is how to communicate persuasively-
in any situation that comes your way. The five-paragraph theme is too rigid and simplified to fit most real-
world situations.
Perhaps most important of all: in a five-paragraph theme, form controls content, when it should be the other
way around. Students begin with a plan for organization, and they force their ideas to fit it. Along the way, their
perfectly good ideas get mangled or lost.
How do I break out of writing five-paragraph themes?
Let's take an example based on our handout Constructing Thesis Statements. Suppose you're taking a United States
History class, and Professor College asks you to write a paper on this topic:
Compare and contrast the reasons why the North and South fought the Civil War.
Alex, preparing to write her first college history paper, decides to write a five-paragraph theme, just like she learned from
Mr. High School. She begins by thinking, "What are three points I can talk about to compare the reasons the North and
South fought the Civil War?" She does a little brainstorming, and she says, "Well, in class, Professor College talked about
the economy, politics, and slavery. I guess I can do a paper about that." So she writes her introduction:
A civil war occurs when two sides in a single country become so angry at each other that they turn to violence.
The Civil War between North and South was a major conflict that nearly tore apart the young United States.
The North and South fought the Civil War for many reasons. In some cases, these reasons were the same, but


in other cases they were very different. In this paper, I will compare and contrast these reasons by examining
the economy, politics, and slavery.
This is a classic five-paragraph theme introduction: it goes from the general to the specific, and it introduces the three
points that will be the subjects of each of the three body paragraphs.
But Professor College doesn't like it, not one little bit. She underlines the first two sentences, and she writes, "This is too
general. Get to the point." She underlines the third and fourth sentences, and she writes, "You're just restating the
question I asked. What's your point?" She underlines the final sentence, and then writes in the margin, "What's your
thesis?" because the last sentence in the paragraph only lists topics. It doesn't make an argument.
Is Professor College just a big old grouch? Well, no, she is trying to teach this student that college writing isn't about
following a formula (the five-paragraph theme), it's about making an argument. Her first sentence is general, the way she
learned a five-paragraph should start. But from Professor College's perspective, it's far too general-so general, in fact,
that it's completely outside of the assignment: she didn't ask students to define civil war. The third and fourth sentences
say, in so many words, "I am comparing and contrasting the reasons why the North and the South fought the Civil
War"-as Professor College says, they just restate the prompt, without giving a single hint about where this student's
paper is going. The final sentence, which should make an argument, only lists topics; it doesn't begin to explore how or
why something happened.
If you've seen a lot of five-paragraph themes, you can guess what Alex will write next. Her first body paragraph will
begin, We can see some of the different reasons why the North and South fought the Civil War by looking at the
economy. What will Professor College say about that? She might ask, "What differences can we see? What part of the
economy are you talking about? Why do the differences exist? Why are they important?" After three such body
paragraphs, the student might write a conclusion that says much the same thing as her introduction, in slightly different
words. Professor College might respond, "You've already said this!"
What could Alex do differently? Let's start over. This time, Alex doesn't begin with a preconceived notion of how to
organize her essay. Instead of three "points," she decides that she will brainstorm until she comes up with a main
argument, or thesis, that answers the question Why did the North and South fight the Civil War? Then she will decide
how to organize her draft by thinking about the argument's parts and how they fit together.
After following a process you can follow in our handout on thesis statements or on brainstorming, Alex thinks of a main
argument, or thesis statement:
Both Northerners and Southerners believed they fought against tyranny and oppression, but Northerners
focused on the oppression of slaves while Southerners defended their rights to property and self-government.
Then Alex writes her introduction. But instead of beginning with a general statement about civil wars, she gives us the
ideas we need to know in order to understand all the parts of her argument:
The United States broke away from England in response to British tyranny and oppression, so opposition to
tyranny and a belief in individual freedom and liberty were important values in the young republic. But in the
nineteenth century, slavery made Northerners and Southerners see these values in very different ways. By 1860,
the conflict over these values broke out into a civil war that nearly tore the country apart. In that war, both
Northerners and Southerners believed they fought against tyranny and oppression, but Northerners focused on
the oppression of slaves while Southerners defended their rights to property and self-government.
You go, girl! Every sentence in her new introduction leads the reader down the path to her thesis statement in an
unbroken chain of ideas.


Now Alex turns to organization. You'll find more about the thinking process she goes through in our handout on
Organization, but here are the basics: first, she decides, she'll write a paragraph that gives background; she'll explain how
opposition to tyranny and a belief in individual liberty came to be such important values in the United States. Then she'll
write another background paragraph in which she shows how the conflict over slavery developed over time. Then she'll
have separate paragraphs about Northerners and Southerners, explaining in detail-and giving evidence for-her claims
about each group's reasons for going to war.
Note that Alex now has four body paragraphs. She might have had three or two or seven; what's important is that she
allowed her argument to tell her how many paragraphs she should have and how to fit them together. Furthermore, her
body paragraphs don't all discuss "points," like "the economy" and "politics"-two of them give background, and the
other two explain Northerners' and Southerners' views in detail.
Finally, having followed her sketch outline and written her paper, Alex turns to writing a conclusion. From our handout
on Conclusions, she knows that a "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" conclusion doesn't move her ideas forward.
Applying the strategies she finds in the handout, she decides that she can use her conclusion to explain why the paper
she's just written really matters-perhaps by pointing out that the fissures in our society that the Civil War opened are, in
many cases, still causing trouble today
Is it ever OK to write a five-paragraph theme?
Yes. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where somebody expects you to make sense of a large body of
information on the spot and write a well-organized, persuasive essay-in fifty minutes or less? Sounds like an essay exam
situation, right? When time is short and the pressure is on, falling back on the good old five-paragraph theme can save
you time and give you confidence. A five-paragraph theme might also work as the framework for a short speech. Try not
to fall into the trap, however, of creating a "listing" thesis statement when your instructor expects an argument; think
about three components of an argument, rather than three "points" to discuss, when planning your body paragraphs. On
the other hand, most professors recognize the constraints of writing blue-book essays, and a "listing" thesis is probably
better than no thesis at all.
Bibliography
Blue, Tina. "AP English Blather," http://www.essayisay.homestead.com/blather.html, accessed Feb. 3, 2004.
Blue, Tina. "A Partial Defense of the Five-Paragraph Theme as a Model for Student Writing,"
http://www.essayisay.homestead.com/fiveparagraphs.html, accessed March 25, 2004.
"Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They?" The New York Times, Dec. 3, 2003, A1.
Hillocks, George Jr. The Testing Trap: How State Assessments Control Learning. New York and London: Teacher's
College Press, 2002.
Katzman, John, Lutz, Andy, and Olson, Erik. "Would Shapespeare Get Into Swarthmore?" The Atlantic Monthly,
March, 2004, 97-99.
Shen, Andrea, "Study looks at role of writing in learning," http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/10.26/06-
writing.html, accessed Feb. 3, 2004.


Argument
This handout will define what an argument is and why you need one in most of your academic essays.
Arguments are everywhere...
You may be surprised to hear that the word "argument" does not have to be written anywhere in your assignment for it
to be an important part of your task. In fact, making an argument--expressing a point of view on a subject and
supporting it with evidence--is often the aim of academic writing. Your instructors may assume that you know this fact,
and therefore they may not explain its importance to you in class. Nevertheless, if your writing assignment asks you to
respond to reading and discussion in class, your instructor likely expects you to produce an argument in your paper.
Most material you learn in college is or has been debated by someone, somewhere, at some time. Even when the
material you read or hear is presented as simple "information" or "fact," it may actually be one person's interpretation of
a set of information or facts. In your writing, instructors may call on you to question that interpretation and either
defend it, refute it, or offer some new view of your own. In writing assignments, you will almost always need to do more
than just present information that you have gathered or regurgitate information that was discussed in class. You will
need to select a point of view and provide evidence (in other words, use "argument") to shape the material and offer
your interpretation of the material.
If you think that "fact," not argument, rules intelligent thinking, consider these examples. At one point, the "great
minds" of Western Europe firmly believed the Earth was flat. They had discussions about how obviously true this "fact"
was. You are able to disagree now because people who saw that argument as faulty set out to make a better argument
and proved it. Differences of opinion are how human knowledge develops, and scholars like your instructors spend their
lives engaged in debate over what may be counted as "true," "real," or "right" in their fields. In their courses, they want
you to engage in similar kinds of critical thinking and debate in your writing.
Argumentation is not just what your instructors do. We all use argumentation on a daily basis, and you probably already
have some skill at crafting an argument. The more you improve your skills in this area, the better you will be at thinking
critically, reasoning, making choices, and weighing evidence.
Making a Claim
What is an argument? In academic writing, an argument is usually a main idea, often called a "claim" or "thesis
statement," backed up with evidence that supports the idea. Ninety-nine percent of the time you will need to make some
sort of claim and use evidence to support it, and your ability to do this well will separate your papers from those of
students who see assignments as mere accumulations of fact and detail. In other words, gone are the happy days of being
given a "topic" about which you can write anything. It is time to stake out a position and prove why it is a good position
for a thinking person to hold.
Claims can be as simple as "protons are positively charged and electrons are negatively charged," with evidence such as,
"In this experiment, protons and electrons acted in such and such a way." Claims can also be as complex as "the end of
the South African system of apartheid was inevitable," using reasoning and evidence such as, "Every successful
revolution in the modern era has come about after the government in power has given and then removed small


concessions to the uprising group." In either case, the rest of your paper will detail reasons and facts that have led you to
believe that your position is best.
When beginning to write a paper, ask yourself, "What is my point"? For example, the point of this handout is to help
you become a better writer, and we are arguing that an important step in the process of writing argumentation is
understanding the concept of argumentation. If your papers do not have a main point, they cannot be arguing for
anything. Asking yourself what your point is can help you avoid a mere "information dump." Consider this: Your
instructors probably know a lot more than you do about your subject matter. Why, then, would you want to provide
them with material they already know? Instructors are usually looking for two things:
1. Proof that you understand the material, AND
2. A demonstration of your ability to use or apply the material beyond what you have read or heard.
This second part can be done in many ways: You can critique the material, or apply it to something else, or even just
explain it in a different way. In order to achieve this second step, though, you must have a particular point to argue.
Arguments in academic writing are usually complex and take time to develop. Your argument will need to be more than
a simple or obvious statement such as, "Frank Lloyd Wright was a great architect." Such a statement might capture your
initial impressions of Wright as you have studied him in class; however, you need to look deeper and express specifically
what caused that "greatness." Your instructor will probably expect something more complicated, such as, "Frank Lloyd
Wright's architecture combines elements of European modernism, Asian aesthetic form, and locally found materials to
create a unique new style," or "There are many strong similarities between Wright's building designs and those of his
mother's, which suggests that he may have borrowed some of her ideas." Then you would define your terms and prove
your argument with evidence from Wright's drawings and buildings and those of the other architects you mentioned.
Evidence
Do not stop with having a point. You have to back up your point with evidence. The strength of your evidence, and
your use of it, can make or break your argument. You already have the natural inclination for this type of thinking, if not
in an academic setting. Think about how you talked your parents into letting you borrow the car. Did you present them
with lots of instances of trustworthiness on your part from the past? Did you make them feel guilty, because your
friends' parents all let them drive? Did you whine until they just wanted you to shut up? Did you look up statistics on
teen driving and use them to show how you didn't fit the dangerous-driver profile? These are all types of argumentation,
and they exist in academia in similar forms.
Every field has slightly different requirements for acceptable evidence, so familiarize yourself with some arguments from
within that field instead of just applying whatever evidence you like best. Pay attention to your textbooks and your
instructor's lectures. What types of argument and evidence are they using? The type of evidence that sways an English
instructor may not work to convince a Sociology instructor. Find out what counts as proof that something is true in that
field. Is it statistics, a logical development of points, something from the object being discussed (art work, text, culture,
or atom), the way something works, or some combination of more than one of these things?
Be consistent with your evidence. Unlike negotiating for the use of your parents' car, a college paper is not the place for
an all-out blitz of every type of argument. You can often use more than one type of evidence within a paper, but make
sure that within each section you are providing the reader with evidence appropriate to each claim. So, if you start a
paragraph or section with a statement like "putting the student section closer to the court in the Dean Dome will raise
player performance," do not follow with your evidence on how much more tuition is raised by letting more students go
to games for free. Information about how fan support raises player morale, which then results in better play, would be a
better follow-up. Then the next section could offer clear reasons why undergraduates have as much or more right to
attend an undergraduate event as wealthy alumni--but not in the same section as the fan support stuff. You cannot
convince a confused person, so keep things tidy and ordered.


Counterargument
One way to strengthen your argument and show that you have a deep understanding of the issue you are discussing is to
anticipate and address counterarguments or objections. By considering what someone who disagrees with your position
might have to say about your argument, you show that your have thought things through, and you dispose of some of
the reasons your audience might have for not accepting your argument. Recall our discussion of student seating in the
Dean Dome. To make the most effective argument possible, you should consider not only what students would say
about seating, but also what alumni who have paid a lot to get good seats might say about the issue.
You can generate counterarguments by asking yourself what someone who disagrees with you might say about each of
the points you've made or about your position as a whole. If you can't immediately imagine another position, here are
some strategies to try:
Do some research. It may seem to you that no one could possibly disagree with the position you are arguing,
but someone probably has. For example, some people argue that the American Civil War never ended. If you
are making an argument concerning, for example, the outcomes of the Civil War, you might wish to see what
some of these people have to say.
Talk with a friend or with your teacher. Another person may be able to imagine counterarguments that haven't
occurred to you.
Consider the conclusion and the premises of your argument, and imagine someone who denies each of them.
Then you can see which of these arguments are most worth considering. For example, if you argued "Cats
make the best pets. This is because they are clean and independent," you might imagine someone saying "Cats
do not make the best pets. They are dirty and needy."
Once you have thought up some counterarguments, consider how you will respond to them--will you concede that your
opponent has a point but explain why your audience should nonetheless accept your argument? Will you reject the
counterargument and explain why it is mistaken? Either way, you will want to leave your reader with a sense that your
argument is stronger than opposing arguments.
When you are summarizing opposing arguments, be charitable. Present each argument fairly and objectively, rather than
trying to make it look foolish. You want to show that you have seriously considered the many sides of the issue, and that
you are not simply attacking or caricaturing your opponents.
It is usually better to consider one or two serious counterarguments in some depth, rather than to give a long but
superficial list of many different counterarguments and replies.
Be sure that your reply is consistent with your original argument. If considering a counterargument changes your
position, you will need to go back and revise your original argument accordingly.
Audience
Audience is a very important consideration in argument. A lifetime of dealing with your parents has helped you figure
out which arguments work in different situations. Maybe whining works with your dad, but your mom will only accept
cold, hard statistics. Your kid brother may listen only to the sound of money in his palm. It's usually wise to think of
your audience in an academic setting as someone who is perfectly smart, but who doesn't already or necessarily agree
with you. You are not just expressing your opinion in an argument ("it's true because I said so")--and in most cases your
audience is pretty knowledgeable on the subject at hand--so you will need sturdier proof. At the same time, do not think
of your audience as a genius clairvoyant. You have to come out and state both your claim and your evidence clearly. Do
not assume that because the instructor knows the material that he or she understands what part of it you are using, what
you think about it, and why.


Critical Reading
Critical reading is a big part of understanding argument. Although some of the material you read will be very persuasive,
do not fall under the spell of the printed word as authority. Very few of your instructors think of the texts they assign as
the last word on the subject. Remember that the author of every text has an agenda, something that they want you to
believe. Take notes either in the margins or on a separate sheet as you read. Put away that highlighter! Simply
highlighting a text is only good for memorizing that text--it does not encourage critical reading. Part of the goal is to put
the author's ideas in your own words. Then you can stop thinking of these ideas as facts and start thinking of them as
arguments.
When you read, ask yourself questions like "What is the author trying to prove?" and "What is the author assuming I will
agree with?" Do you agree with the author? Does the author adequately defend her argument? What kind of proof does
she use? Is there something she leaves out that you would put in? Does putting it in hurt her argument? As you get used
to reading critically, you will start to see the sometimes hidden agendas of other writers, and you can use this skill to
improve your own ability to argue.
References:
Anson, Chris M. and Robert A Schwegler. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers. 2nd ed. New York, Longman,
2000.
Booth, Wayne C. The Craft of Research. 2
nd
ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Ede, Lisa. Work in Progress. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.
Gage, John T. The Shape of Reason: Argumentative Writing in College. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991. [Not
in UNC Libraries; Available on Writing Center bookshelf.]
Lunsford, Andrea and John Ruszkiewicz. Everything's an Argument. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. [Not
in UNC Libraries; Available on Writing Center bookshelf.]
Rosen, Leonard J. and Laurence Behrens. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997.


Toulmin's Analysis
Stephen Toulmin, a modern
rhetorician, believed that few
arguments actually follow classical
models of logic like the syllogism,
so he developed a model for
analyzing the kind of argument you
read and hear every day--in
newspapers and on television, at
work, in classrooms, and in
conversation. Toulmin's model
focuses on identifying the basic
parts of an argument. As a
researcher and writer, you can use Toulmin's model two ways:
to identify and analyze your sources by identifying the basic elements of the arguments being
made, and
to test and critique your own argument.
Please note that this page presents only a very simplified version of Toulmin's theory. For a more
complete understanding, you should read Toulmin's book The Uses of Argument (Cambridge
University Press, 1958).
Toulmin identifies the three essential parts of any argument as the claim, the data or evidence
which is offered to support the claim, and the warrant.
The warrant is the assumption on which the claim and the evidence depend. Another way of saying
this would be that the warrant explains why the data supports the claim. For example, suppose you
see a one of those commercials for a product that promises to give you whiter teeth. Here are the
basic parts of the argument behind the commercial:
Claim
You should buy our
tooth-whitening product.

Data
Studies show that teeth
are 50% whiter after using
the product for a
specified time.
Warrant People want whiter teeth.
Notice that those commercials don't usually bother trying to convince you that you want whiter
teeth; instead, they assume that you have bought into the value our culture places on whiter teeth.
When an assumption--a warrant in Toulmin's terms--is unstated, it's called an implicit warrant.


Sometimes, however, the warrant may need to be stated because it is a powerful part of the
argument. When the warrant is stated, it's called an explicit warrant.
Toulmin says that the weakest part of any argument is its weakest warrant. Remember that
the warrant is the link between the data and the claim. If the warrant isn't valid, the
argument collapses.
Now that you're familiar with the three main parts of an argument, let's look at three other elements
Toulmin identified.
Qualifier
A qualifier is a statement
about how strong the claim
is. For example, if you are
claiming that stains on teeth
are caused by drinking
coffee, you might need to
acknowledge that there may
be other causes as well.
Your qualified claim would
be that drinking coffee is the
most significant cause
(although perhaps not the
only cause) of stained
teeth.
Rebuttal
A rebuttal is an exception to your claim. For example, you might have to acknowledge
that a certain kind of coffee does not stain teeth. Your claim, however, would be that
coffee is the major cause of stained teeth except for those coffee drinkers who drink
the special non-teeth staining coffee.
Backing
Sometimes the warrant is an important part of the argument. Additionally, sometimes the
warrant is not broadly understood or broadly accepted. In this case, a speaker or writer
may have to defend the warrant. In our example, the warrant would need to be backed by
reasons such as the argument that whiter teeth will help you get more dates or that whiter
teeth will make you look better in yearbook photos. Reasons that support the warrant are
called backing.
So--how do you make this model work for you?
Have you ever noticed that when you research both sides of a question, you find yourself being
convinced first by one side, and then by the other? Each argument sounds good--at least while you


are reading it. When you read an argument which takes an opposite position--that sounds good too,
and soon you may feel completely confused.
Toulmin to the rescue! By identifying the parts of an argument so each can be evaluated
separately, Toulmin created a very useful model for analyzing the validity of an argument. Submit
each source you study to rigorous Toulmin analysis. Identify each argument's claims, data, and
warrants. Look for qualifiers, rebuttals, and backing for the warrants. Compare one claim with
another. Compare data between the two arguments. Compare warrants and their backing, qualifiers,
and rebuttals. By analyzing the separate parts of an argument, you'll be much better equipped to
evaluate each argument's validity. Then, as you begin to write, use Toulmin's methods to submit
your own argument to the same rigorous analysis.
Use this worksheet in MS Word or rich text format as a guide to using Toulmin's model to question
and evaluate your research sources.
Links to Other Resources
Stephen Toulmin (brief biography)
The Toulmin Project Home Page
Toulmin Argument



Toulmins Model of Argument

How to use this worksheet:
Toulmins model is an effective tool to help you question your
sources and the essential elements of your own argument.

Use a separate copy of this worksheet to evaluate each of your
sources. Once youve identified the specific parts of each
argument, compare the claims, the data, the warrants (along with
any qualifiers, rebuttals, or backing). Note where arguments are
similar or different, weaker or stronger, supported by more or
less (or by convincing or unconvincing) data.

Use another copy of the worksheet to plan your own argument.
Decide on a claim that is supported by the data and the warrants
you have discovered through your research. Knowing the
elemental structure of your argument is an essential step toward
producing an effective argument.

Source: (Record the full source citation
here)_______________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
List each claim made in the argument.____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Record the data used to support each claim.________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________


Identify the warrants. (What assumptions make the data support the claims?) Are these warrants implicit
(implied) or explicit (clearly stated)?______________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Record any backing given for the warrant(s)._______________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
List any qualifiers._____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
List any rebuttals._____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
What is your overall evaluation of the strength or weakness of this argument? What reasons can you give to
support your evaluation?________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________


Brainstorming
This handout discusses techniques that will help you start writing a paper and continue writing through the challenges of
the revising process. Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop an approach to a topic, or deepen your
understanding of the topic's potential.
Introduction
If you consciously take advantage of your natural thinking processes by gathering your brain's energies into a "storm,"
you can transform these energies into written words or diagrams that will lead to lively, vibrant writing. Below you will
find a brief discussion of what brainstorming is, why you might brainstorm, and suggestions for how you might
brainstorm.
Whether you are starting with too much information or not enough, brainstorming can help you to put a new writing
task in motion or revive a project that hasn't reached completion. Let's take a look at each case:
When you've got nothing: You might need a storm to approach when you feel "blank" about the topic, devoid of
inspiration, full of anxiety about the topic, or just too tired to craft an orderly outline. In this case, brainstorming stirs up
the dust, whips some air into our stilled pools of thought, and gets the breeze of inspiration moving again.
When you've got too much: There are times when you have too much chaos in your brain and need to bring in some
conscious order. In this case, brainstorming forces the mental chaos and random thoughts to rain out onto the page,
giving you some concrete words or schemas that you can then arrange according to their logical relations.
Brainstorming Techniques
What follows are great ideas on how to brainstorm-ideas from professional writers, novice writers, people who would
rather avoid writing, and people who spend a lot of time brainstorming aboutwell, how to brainstorm.
Try out several of these options and challenge yourself to vary the techniques you rely on; some techniques might suit a
particular writer, academic discipline, or assignment better than others. If the technique you try first doesn't seem to help
you, move right along and try some others.
Freewriting
When you freewrite, you let your thoughts flow as they will, putting pen to paper and writing down whatever comes into
your mind. You don't judge the quality of what you write and you don't worry about style or any surface-level issues, like
spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can't think of what to say, you write that down-really. The advantage of this
technique is that you free up your internal critic and allow yourself to write things you might not write if you were being
too self-conscious.
When you freewrite you can set a time limit ("I'll write for 15 minutes!") and even use a kitchen timer or alarm clock or
you can set a space limit ("I'll write until I fill four full notebook pages, no matter what tries to interrupt me!") and just


write until you reach that goal. You might do this on the computer or on paper, and you can even try it with your eyes
shut or the monitor off, which encourages speed and freedom of thought.
The crucial point is that you keep on writing even if you believe you are saying nothing. Word must follow word, no
matter the relevance. Your freewriting might even look like this:
"This paper is supposed to be on the politics of tobacco production but even though I went to all the lectures and read
the book I can't think of what to say and I've felt this way for four minutes now and I have 11 minutes left and I wonder
if I'll keep thinking nothing during every minute but I'm not sure if it matters that I am babbling and I don't know what
else to say about this topic and it is rainy today and I never noticed the number of cracks in that wall before and those
cracks remind me of the walls in my grandfather's study and he smoked and he farmed and I wonder why he didn't farm
tobacco..."
When you're done with your set number of minutes or have reached your page goal, read back over the text. Yes, there
will be a lot of filler and unusable thoughts but there also will be little gems, discoveries, and insights. When you find
these gems, highlight them or cut and paste them into your draft or onto an "ideas" sheet so you can use them in your
paper. Even if you don't find any diamonds in there, you will have either quieted some of the noisy chaos or greased the
writing gears so that you can now face the assigned paper topic.
Break down the topic into levels:
Once you have a course assignment in front of you, you might brainstorm:
the general topic, like "The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers"
a specific subtopic or required question, like "How did the availability of multiple tropical fruits influence competition
amongst colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean islands during the 19th century?"
a single term or phrase that you sense you're overusing in the paper. For example: If you see that you've written "increased
the competition" about a dozen times in your "tropical fruits" paper, you could brainstorm variations on the
phrase itself or on each of the main terms: "increased" and "competition."
Listing/Bulleting:
In this technique you jot down lists of words or phrases under a particular topic. Try this one by basing your list either
on the general topic
on one or more words from your particular thesis claim, or
on a word or idea that is the complete opposite of your original word or idea.
For example, if your general assignment is to write about the changes in inventions over time, and your specific thesis
claims that "the 20th century presented a large number of inventions to advance US society by improving upon the
status of 19th-century society," you could brainstorm two different lists to ensure you are covering the topic thoroughly
and that your thesis will be easy to prove.
The first list might be based on your thesis; you would jot down as many 20th-century inventions as you could, as long
as you know of their positive effects on society. The second list might be based on the opposite claim and you would
instead jot down inventions that you associate with a decline in that society's quality. You could do the same two lists for
19th-century inventions and then compare the evidence from all four lists.
Using multiple lists will help you to gather more perspective on the topic and ensure that, sure enough, your thesis is
solid as a rock, or, uh oh, your thesis is full of holes and you'd better alter your claim to one you can prove.


Cubing:
Cubing enables you to consider your topic from six different directions; just as a cube is six-sided, your cubing
brainstorming will result in six "sides" or approaches to the topic. Take a sheet of paper, consider your topic, and
respond to these six commands.
1. Describe it.
2. Compare it.
3. Associate it.
4. Analyze it.
5. Apply it.
6. Argue for and against it.
Look over what you've written. Do any of the responses suggest anything new about your topic? What interactions do
you notice among the "sides"? That is, do you see patterns repeating, or a theme emerging that you could use to
approach the topic or draft a thesis? Does one side seem particularly fruitful in getting your brain moving? Could that
one side help you draft your thesis statement? Use this technique in a way that serves your topic. It should, at least, give
you a broader awareness of the topic's complexities, if not a sharper focus on what you will do with it.
Similes:
In this technique, complete the following sentence:
____________________ is/was/are/were like _____________________.

In the first blank put one of the terms or concepts your paper centers on. Then try to brainstorm as many answers as
possible for the second blank, writing them down as you come up with them.
After you have produced a list of options, look over your ideas. What kinds of ideas come forward? What patterns or
associations do you find?
Clustering/ Mapping/ Webbing:
The general idea:
This technique has three (or more) different names, according to how you describe the activity itself or what the end
product looks like. In short, you will write a lot of different terms and phrases onto a sheet of paper in a random fashion
and later go back to link the words together into a sort of "map" or "web" that forms groups from the separate parts.
Allow yourself to start with chaos. After the chaos subsides, you will be able to create some order out of it.
To really let yourself go in this brainstorming technique, use a large piece of paper or tape two pieces together. You
could also use a blackboard if you are working with a group of people. This big vertical space allows all members room
to "storm" at the same time, but you might have to copy down the results onto paper later. If you don't have big paper
at the moment, don't worry. You can do this on an 8 by 11 as well.
How to do it:
1. Take your sheet(s) of paper and write your main topic in the center, using a word or two or three.


2. Moving out from the center and filling in the open space any way you are driven to fill it, start to write down,
fast, as many related concepts or terms as you can associate with the central topic. Jot them quickly, move into
another space, jot some more down, move to another blank, and just keep moving around and jotting. If you
run out of similar concepts, jot down opposites, jot down things that are only slightly related, or jot down your
grandpa's name, but try to keep moving and associating. Don't worry about the (lack of) sense of what you
write, for you can chose to keep or toss out these ideas when the activity is over.
3. Once the storm has subsided and you are faced with a hail of terms and phrases, you can start to cluster. Circle
terms that seem related and then draw a line connecting the circles. Find some more and circle them and draw
more lines to connect them with what you think is closely related. When you run out of terms that associate,
start with another term. Look for concepts and terms that might relate to that term. Circle them and then link
them with a connecting line. Continue this process until you have found all the associated terms. Some of the
terms might end up uncircled, but these "loners" can also be useful to you. (Note: You can use different
colored pens/pencils/chalk for this part, if you like. If that's not possible, try to vary the kind of line you use to
encircle the topics; use a wavy line, a straight line, a dashed line, a dotted line, a zigzaggy line, etc. in order to
see what goes with what.)
4. There! When you stand back and survey your work, you should see a set of clusters, or a big web, or a sort of
map: hence the names for this activity. At this point you can start to form conclusions about how to approach
your topic. There are about as many possible results to this activity as there are stars in the night sky, so what
you do from here will depend on your particular results. Let's take an example or two in order to illustrate how
you might form some logical relationships between the clusters and loners you've decided to keep. At the end
of the day, what you do with the particular "map" or "cluster set" or "web" that you produce depends on what
you need. What does this map or web tell you to do? Explore an option or two and get your draft going!
Relationship Between the Parts:
In this technique, begin by writing the following pairs of terms on opposite margins of one sheet of paper:
Whole

Parts
Part Parts of Parts
Part Parts of Parts
Part Parts of Parts
Looking over these four groups of pairs, start to fill in your ideas below each heading. Keep going down through as
many levels as you can. Now, look at the various parts that comprise the parts of your whole concept. What sorts of
conclusions can you draw according to the patterns, or lack of patterns, that you see?
Journalistic Questions:
In this technique you would use the "big six" questions that journalists rely on to thoroughly research a story. The six
are: Who?, What?, When?, Where?, Why?, and How?. Write each question word on a sheet of paper, leaving space
between them. Then, write out some sentences or phrases in answer, as they fit your particular topic. You might also
answer into a tape recorder if you'd rather talk out your ideas.
Now look over your batch of responses. Do you see that you have more to say about one or two of the questions? Or,
are your answers for each question pretty well balanced in depth and content? Was there one question that you had
absolutely no answer for? How might this awareness help you to decide how to frame your thesis claim or to organize


your paper? Or, how might it reveal what you must work on further, doing library research or interviews or further note-
taking?
For example, if your answers reveal that you know a lot more about "where" and "why" something happened than you
know about "what" and "when," how could you use this lack of balance to direct your research or to shape your paper?
How might you organize your paper so that it emphasizes the known versus the unknown aspects of evidence in the
field of study? What else might you do with your results?
Thinking Outside the Box:
Even when you are writing within a particular academic discipline, you can take advantage of your semesters of
experience in other courses from other departments. Let's say you are writing a paper for an English course. You could
ask yourself, "Hmmm, if I were writing about this very same topic in a biology course or using this term in a history
course, how might I see or understand it differently? Are there varying definitions for this concept within, say,
philosophy or physics, that might encourage me to think about this term from a new, richer point of view?"
For example, when discussing "culture" in your English 11, communications, or cultural studies course, you could
incorporate the definition of "culture" that is frequently used in the biological sciences. Remember those little Petri
dishes from your lab experiments in high school? Those dishes are used to "culture" substances for bacterial growth and
analysis, right? How might it help you write your paper if you thought of "culture" as a medium upon which certain
things will grow, will develop in new ways or will even flourish beyond expectations, but upon which the growth of
other things might be retarded, significantly altered, or stopped altogether?
Using Charts or Shapes:
If you are more visually inclined, you might create charts, graphs, or tables in lieu of word lists or phrases as you try to
shape or explore an idea. You could use the same phrases or words that are central to your topic and try different ways
to arrange them spatially, say in a graph, on a grid, or in a table or chart. You might even try the trusty old flow chart.
The important thing here is to get out of the realm of words alone and see how different spatial representations might
help you see the relationships among your ideas. If you can't imagine the shape of a chart at first, just put down the
words on the page and then draw lines between or around them. Or think of a shape. Do your ideas most easily form a
triangle? square? umbrella? Can you put some ideas in parallel formation? In a line?
Consider Purpose and Audience:
Think about the parts of communication involved in any writing or speaking event act: purpose and audience.
What is your purpose? What are you trying to do? What verb captures your intent? Are you trying to inform? Convince?
Describe? Each purpose will lead you to a different set of information and help you shape material to include and
exclude in a draft. Write about why you are writing this draft in this form.
Who is your audience? Who are you communicating with beyond the grader? What does that audience need to know?
What do they already know? What information does that audience need first, second, third? Write about who you are
writing to and what they need.
Dictionaries, Thesauruses, Encyclopedias:
When all else failsthis is a tried and true method, loved for centuries by writers of all stripe. Visit the library reference
areas or stop by the Writing Center to browse various dictionaries, thesauruses (or other guide books and reference


texts), encyclopedias or surf their online counterparts. Sometimes these basic steps are the best ones. It is almost
guaranteed that you'll learn several things you did not know.
If you're looking at a hard copy reference, turn to your most important terms and see what sort of variety you find in the
definitions. The obscure or archaic definition might help you to appreciate the term's breadth or realize how much its
meaning has changed as the language changed. Could that realization be built into your paper somehow?
If you go to online sources, use their own search functions to find your key terms and see what suggestions they offer.
For example, if you plug "good" into a thesaurus search, you will be given 14 different entries. Whew! If you were
analyzing the film Good Will Hunting, imagine how you could enrich your paper by addressed the six or seven ways that
"good" could be interpreted according to how the scenes, lighting, editing, music, etc., emphasized various aspects of
"good."
An encyclopedia is sometimes a valuable resource if you need to clarify facts, get quick background, or get a broader
context for an event or item. If you are stuck because you have a vague sense of a seemingly important issue, do a quick
check with this reference and you may be able to move forward with your ideas.
Closing
Armed with a full quiver of brainstorming techniques and facing sheets of jotted ideas, bulleted subtopics, or spidery
webs relating to your paper, what do you do now?
Take the next step and start to write your first draft, or fill in those gaps you've been brainstorming about to complete
your "almost ready" paper. If you're a fan of outlining, prepare one that incorporates as much of your brainstorming
data as seems logical to you. If you're not a fan, don't make one. Instead, start to write out some larger chunks (large
groups of sentences or full paragraphs) to expand upon your smaller clusters and phrases. Keep building from there into
larger sections of your paper. You don't have to start at the beginning of the draft. Start writing the section that comes
together most easily. You can always go back to write the introduction later.
We also have helpful handouts on some of the next steps in your writing process, such as Organization and Argument in
Academic Writing and others.
Remember, once you've begun the paper, you can stop and try another brainstorming technique whenever you feel
stuck. Keep the energy moving and try several techniques to find what suits you or the particular project you are
working on.
Bibliography
Allen, Roberta, and Marcia Mascolini. The Process of Writing: Composing through Critical Thinking. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice. 1997.
Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. New York: Putnam, 1995.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.
Rosen, Leonard J., and Laurence Behrens. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn, 1992.
University of Richmond Writing Center. "Writer's Web." 1 Apr. 2003.
<http://writing.richmond.edu/writing/wweb.html>.


Introductions
This handout will explain the functions of introductions, offer strategies for writing effective ones, help you check your
drafted introductions, and provide you with examples of introductions to be avoided.
The Role of Introductions
Introductions and conclusions can be the most difficult parts of papers to write. Usually when you sit down to respond
to an assignment, you have at least some sense of what you want to say in the body of your paper. You might have
chosen a few examples you want to use or have an idea that will help you answer the question: these sections, therefore,
are not as hard to write. But these middle parts of the paper can't just come out of thin air; they need to be introduced
and they need to be concluded in a way that makes sense to your reader.
What purpose do these sections serve? Your introduction and conclusion act as bridges that transport your readers from
their own lives into the "place" of your analysis. If your readers pick up your paper about education in the autobiography
of Frederick Douglass, for example, they need a transition to help them leave behind the world of Chapel Hill, network
television, e-mail and the The Daily Tar Heel and to help them temporarily enter the world of nineteenth-century
American slavery. By providing an introduction that helps your readers make a transition between their own world and
the issues you will be writing about, you give your readers the tools they need to get into your topic and care about what
you are saying. Similarly, once you've hooked your reader with the introduction and offered evidence to prove your
thesis, your conclusion can provide a bridge to help your reader make the transition back to their daily lives. (See our
handout on conclusions.) Such a conclusion will help them see why all that analysis about nineteenth-century education
and American slavery should matter to them after they put the paper down.
Why bother writing a good introduction?
1. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The opening paragraph of your paper will
provide your readers with their initial impressions of your argument, your writing style, and the overall quality
of your work. A vague, disorganized, error-filled, off-the-wall, or boring introduction will probably create a
negative impression. On the other hand, a concise, engaging, and well-written introduction will start your
readers off thinking highly of you, your analytical skills, your writing, and your paper. This impression is
especially important when the audience you are trying to reach (your instructor) will be grading your work. Do
you want that audience to start off thinking "C+" or thinking "A"?
2. Your introduction is an important road map for the rest of your paper. Your introduction conveys a lot of
information to your readers. You can let them know what your topic is, why it is important, and how you plan
to proceed with your discussion. It should contain a thesis that will assert your main argument. It will also,
ideally, give the reader a sense of the kinds of information you will use to make that argument and the general
organization of the paragraphs and pages that will follow. After reading your introduction, your readers should
not have any major surprises in store when they read the main body of your paper.
3. Ideally, your introduction will make your readers want to read your paper. The introduction should also
capture your readers' interest, making them want to read the rest of your paper. Opening with a compelli ng
story, a fascinating quotation, an interesting question, or a stirring example can get your readers to see why this
topic matters and serve as an invitation for them to join you for an interesting intellectual conversation.
Strategies for Writing an Effective Introduction


Start by thinking about the question. Your entire essay will be a response to the assigned question, and your
introduction is the first step toward that end. Your direct answer to the assigned question will be your thesis,
and your thesis will be included in your introduction, so it is a good idea to use the question as a jumping off
point. Imagine that you are assigned the following question:
Education has long been considered a major force for American social change, righting the wrongs of our society. Drawing on The Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, discuss the relationship between education and slavery in 19th century America. Consider the following: How
did white control of education reinforce slavery? How did Douglass and other enslaved African Americans view education while they endured
slavery? And what role did education play in the acquisition of freedom? Most importantly, consider the degree to which education was or was
not a major force for social change with regard to slavery.
You will probably refer back to this question extensively as you prepare your complete essay, and the question itself can
also give you some clues about how to approach the introduction. Notice that the question starts with a broad
statement, that education has been considered a major force for social change, and then narrows to focus on specific
questions from the book. One strategy might be to use a similar model in your own introduction -- start off with a big
picture sentence or two about the power of education as a force for change as a way of getting your reader interested
and then focus in on the details of your argument about Douglass. Of course, a different approach could also be very
successful, but looking at the way the professor set up the question can sometimes give you some ideas for how you
might answer it. (See our handout on Reading Assignments for additional information on the hidden clues in
assignments.)
Try writing your introduction last. You may think that you have to write your introduction first, but that
isn't necessarily true, and it isn't always the most effective way to craft a good introduction. You may find that
you don't know what you are going to argue at the beginning of the writing process, and only through the
experience of writing your paper do you discover your main argument. It is perfectly fine to start out thinking
that you want to argue a particular point, but wind up arguing something slightly or even dramatically different
by the time you've written most of the paper. The writing process can be an important way to organize your
ideas, think through complicated issues, refine your thoughts, and develop a sophisticated argument. However,
an introduction written at the beginning of that discovery process will not necessarily reflect what you wind up
with at the end. You will need to revise your paper to make sure that the introduction, all of the evidence, and
the conclusion reflect the argument you intend. Sometimes it helps to write up all of your evidence first and
then write the introduction -- that way you can be sure that the introduction matches the body of the paper.
Don't be afraid to write a tentative introduction first and then change it later. Some people find that they need
to write some kind of introduction in order to get the writing process started. That's fine, but if you are one of
those people, be sure to return to your initial introduction later and rewrite if need be.
Open with an attention grabber. Sometimes, especially if the topic of your paper is somewhat dry or technical,
opening with something catchy can help. Consider these options:
1. an intriguing example (for example, the mistress who initially teaches Douglass but then ceases her instruction
as she learns more about slavery)
2. a provocative quotation, (Douglass writes that "education and slavery were incompatible with each other")
3. a puzzling scenario, (Frederick Douglass says of slaves that "[N]othing has been left undone to cripple their
intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind;
and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most frightful bondage, under which they
have been groaning for centuries!" Douglass clearly asserts that slave owners went to great lengths to destroy
the mental capacities of slaves, but yet his own life story proves that these efforts could be unsuccessful.)
4. a vivid and perhaps unexpected anecdote (Learning about slavery in the American history course at Frederick
Douglass High School, students studied the work slaves did, the impact of slavery on their families, and the
rules that governed their lives. We didn't discuss education, however, until one student, Mary, raised her hand
and asked, "But when did they go to school?" That modern high school students could not conceive of an
American childhood devoid of formal education speaks volumes about the centrality of education to American
youth today, and also suggests the meanings of the deprivation of education to past generations."


5. a thought-provoking question (Given all of the freedoms that were denied enslaved individuals in the American
South, why does Frederick Douglass focus his attentions so squarely on education and literacy?)
These attention-grabbing openers might get your reader interested and also help your reader connect to what might
otherwise seem a pretty obscure topic. Essentially, you can use attention-grabbers to help your readers see why your
topic is relevant and to help them begin to care about your findings and perspectives.
Pay special attention to your first sentence. If any sentence in your paper is going to be completely free of
errors and vagueness, it should be your first one. Start off on the right foot with your readers by making sure
that the first sentence actually says something useful and that it does so in an interesting and error-free way.
Be straightforward and confident. Avoid statements like "In this paper, I will argue that Frederick Douglass
valued education." While this sentence points toward your main argument, it isn't especially interesting. It
might be more effective to say what mean in a declarative sentence. It is much more convincing to tell that
"Frederick Douglass valued education" than to tell us that you are going to say that he did. Assert your main
argument confidently. After all, you can't expect your reader to believe it if it doesn't sound like you believe it!
How to Evaluate Your Introduction Draft
Ask a friend to read it and then tell you what they expect the paper will discuss, what kinds of evidence the paper will
use, and what the tone of the paper will be. If your friend is able to predict the rest of your paper accurately, you
probably have a good introduction.
Five Kinds of Less Effective Introductions
1. The Place Holder Introduction. When you don't have much to say on a given topic, it is easy to create this kind of
introduction. Essentially, this kind of weaker introduction contains several sentences that are vague and don't really say
much. They exist just to take up the "introduction space" in your paper. If you had something more effective to say, you
would probably say it, but in the meantime this paragraph is just a place holder.
Weak Example: Slavery was one of the greatest tragedies in American history. There were many different aspects of slavery. Each created
different kinds of problems for enslaved people.
2. The Restated Question Introduction. Restating the question can be an effective strategy, but it can be easy to stop
at JUST restating the question instead of offering a more effective, interesting introduction to your paper. The professor
or teaching assistant wrote your questions and will be reading ten to seventy essays in response to them--they do not
need to read a whole paragraph that simply restates the question. Try to do something more interesting.
Weak Example: Indeed, education has long been considered a major force for American social change, righting the wrongs of our society. The
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass discusses the relationship between education and slavery in 19th century America, showing
how white control of education reinforced slavery and how Douglass and other enslaved African Americans viewed education while they
endured. Moreover, the book discusses the role that education played in the acquisition of freedom. Education was a major force for social
change with regard to slavery.
3. The Webster's Dictionary Introduction. This introduction begins by giving the dictionary definition of one or
more of the words in the assigned question. This introduction strategy is on the right track--if you write one of these,
you may be trying to establish the important terms of the discussion, and this move builds a bridge to the reader by
offering a common, agreed-upon definition for a key idea. You may also be looking for an authority that will lend
credibility to your paper. However, anyone can look a word up in the dictionary and copy down what Webster says - it
may be far more interesting for you (and your reader) if you develop your own definition of the term in the specific
context of your class and assignment. Also recognize that the dictionary is also not a particularly authoritative work -- it
doesn't take into account the context of your course and doesn't offer particularly detailed information. If you feel that


you must seek out an authority, try to find one that is very relevant and specific. Perhaps a quotation from a source
reading might prove better? Dictionary introductions are also ineffective simply because they are so overused. Many
graders will see twenty or more papers that begin in this way, greatly decreasing the dramatic impact that any one of
those papers will have. You might find a more creative way to define your terms, or perhaps you could weave a
definition into a more attention-grabbing introductory paragraph.
Weak Example: Webster's dictionary defines slavery as "the state of being a slave," as "the practice of owning slaves," and as "a condition of
hard work and subjection."
4. The Dawn of Man Introduction. This kind of introduction generally makes broad sweeping statements about the
relevance of this topic since the beginning of time. It is usually very general (similar to the place holder introduction) and
fails to connect to the thesis. You may write this kind of introduction when you don't have much to say--which is
precisely why it is ineffective.
Weak Example: Since the dawn of man, slavery has been a problem in human history.
5. The Book Report Introduction. This introduction is what you had to do for your fifth-grade book reports. It gives
the name and author of the book you are writing about, tells what the book is about, and offers other basic facts about
the book. You might resort to this sort of introduction when you are trying to fill space because it's a familiar,
comfortable format. It is ineffective because it offers details that your reader already knows and that are irrelevant to the
thesis.
Weak Example: Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,
in the 1840s. It was published in 1986 by Penguin Books. He tells the story of his life.
Sources
All quotations are from Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, edited and
with introduction by Houston A. Baker, Jr., New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Also available on the Internet
http://www.toptags.com/aama/books/book10.htm


Thesis Statements

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how it works in your writing, and how you can discover or refine one
for your draft.
Introduction
Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion, i.e. convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of
view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your
roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy.
In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader
of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing.
After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence.
This sentence is the thesis statement and it serves as a summary of the argument you'll make in the rest of your paper.
What is a thesis statement?
A thesis statement:
tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject
itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to
understand the war or the novel that others might dispute.
is usually a single sentence somewhere in your first paragraph that presents your argument to the reader. The
rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the
logic of your interpretation.
If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position
or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a
thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the
assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast,
to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis
and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout, How to Read an Assignment, for more information.)
How do I get a thesis?
A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an
essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for
possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance
of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a "working thesis," a basic or main idea, an
argument that you think you can support with evidence but that may need adjustment along the way.


Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the
broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on
Brainstorming.
How do I know if my thesis is strong?
If there's time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if
you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first
draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following:
Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an
argument that misses the focus of the question.
Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a
strong argument. If your thesis contains words like "good" or "successful," see if you could be more specific:
Why is something "good"; What makes something "successful"?
Does my thesis pass the 'So What?' test? If a reader's first response is, "So what?" then you need to clarify, to forge a
relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not
seem to go together, one of them has to change. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as
necessary.
Does my thesis pass the how or why test? If a reader's first response is "how? or why? your thesis may be too open-
ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position
right from the beginning.
Examples
Suppose you are taking a course on 19th-century America, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment:
Compare and contrast the reasons why the North and South fought the Civil War. You turn on the computer and type
out the following:
The North and South fought the Civil War for many reasons, some of which were the same and some different.
This weak thesis restates the question without providing any additional information. You will expand on this new
information in the body of the essay, but it is important that the reader know where you are heading. A reader of this
weak thesis might think, "What reasons? How are they the same? How are they different?" Ask yourself these same
questions and begin to compare Northern and Southern attitudes ("The South believed slavery was right, and the North
thought slavery was wrong"). Now, push your comparison toward an interpretation-why did one side think slavery was
right and the other side think it was wrong? You look again at the evidence and you decide the North believed slavery
was immoral while the South believed it upheld their way of life. You write:
While both sides fought the Civil War over the issue of slavery, the North fought for moral reasons while the South fought to preserve its own
institutions.
Now you have a working thesis! Included in this working thesis is a reason for the war and some idea of how the two
sides disagreed over this reason. As you write the essay, you will probably begin to characterize these differences more
precisely and your working thesis may seem vague. Maybe you decide that both sides fought for moral reasons, they just
saw morality in different contexts. You end up revising the working thesis into a final thesis that really captures the
argument in your paper:


While both Northerners and Southerners believed they fought against tyranny and oppression, Northerners focused on the oppression of slaves
while Southerners defended their own rights to property and self-government.
Compare this to the original weak thesis. This final thesis presents a way of interpreting evidence that illuminates the
significance of the question. Keep in mind that this is one of many possible interpretations of the Civil War-it is not the one and only
right answer to the question. There isn't a right answer; there are only strong and weak thesis statements and strong and weak
uses of evidence.
Let's look at another example. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the
American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn. "This will be easy," you
think. "I loved Huckleberry Finn!" You grab a pad of paper and write:
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.
Why is this thesis weak? Think about what the reader would expect from the essay that follows: you will most likely
provide a general, appreciative summary of Twain's novel. The question did not ask you to summarize, it asked you to
analyze. Your professor is probably not interested in your opinion of the novel; instead, she wants you to think about
why it's such a great novel-what do Huck's adventures tell us about life, about America, about coming of age, about race
relations, etc.? First, the question asks you to pick an aspect of the novel that you think is important to its structure or
meaning-for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships
between adults and children. Now you write:
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.
Here's a working thesis with potential: you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation; however,
it's still not clear what your analysis will reveal. Your reader is intrigued, but is still thinking, "So what? What's the point
of this contrast? What does it signify?" Perhaps you are not sure yet, either. That's fine-begin to work on comparing
scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck's actions and reactions.
Eventually you will be able to clarify for yourself, and then for the reader, why this contrast matters. After examining the
evidence and considering your own insights, you write:
Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain's Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic
ideals, one must leave "civilized" society and go back to nature.
This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for
the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your
interpretation.
Bibliography
Anson, Chris M. and Robert A. Schwegler. The Longman Handbook for Writers. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 2000.
Hairston, Maxine and John J. Ruszkiewicz. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers. 4th ed. New York:
HarperCollins, 1996.
Lunsford, Andrea and Robert Connors. The St. Martin's Handbook. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.
Rosen, Leonard J. and Laurence Behrens. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997.



Paragraph Development
This handout will
help you understand how paragraphs are formed
help you develop stronger paragraphs
help you learn how to completely and clearly express your ideas
What is a paragraph?
One of the central components of a paper is the paragraph. When most students think of a paragraph, they hold onto
the old myths about length: a paragraph is at least 5 sentences, a paragraph is half a page, etc. A paragraph, however, is
"a group of sentences or a single sentence that forms a unit" (Lunsford and Connors,116). Length or appearance is not a
factor in determining whether a section in a paper is a paragraph. In fact, it is not the number of sentences that construct
a paragraph, but it is the unity and coherence of ideas among those sentences that makes a paragraph a paragraph. For
instance, in some styles of writing, particularly journalistic styles, a paragraph can be one sentence. As long as that
sentence expresses the paper's central idea, that sentence can serve the function of a paragraph. Ultimately, strong
paragraphs contain a sentence or sentences unified around one central, controlling idea. When the paragraph reaches
completion it should serve to bring the reader into your paper and guide his/her understanding of what has been read.
Whether that completion happens with one sentence or with twenty, the end result is still a paragraph.
How do I decide what to put in a paragraph?
Before you can begin to determine what the composition of your paragraphs will be, you must first understand what the
controlling idea in your specific piece of writing is. What is the main point or expression that you are trying to convey to
your reader? The information that comprises your paragraphs should always have a relationship to this controlling idea.
In other words, your paragraphs should remind your reader, at every possible point, that there is a recurrent relationship
between your controlling idea and the information in each paragraph. The controlling idea functions like a seed through
which your paper, and your ideas, will grow. The whole process is an organic one--a natural progression from a seed to a
full-blown paper where there are direct, familial relationships between all of the ideas in your paper. Once you have
decided what your controlling idea will be, then you should choose information that will help to support and perpetuate
that idea throughout the entire paper. That information takes the form of sentences that comprise each paragraph of
your paper.
The decision about what to put into your paragraphs, ultimately, begins with the germination of a seed of ideas. This
"germination process" is better known as the process of brainstorming. Whatever the topic of your paper may be, it is
always a good idea to think about all of the issues that surround your topic and the ultimate goals that you want to
express. This process can take on many forms. What form you choose will depend heavily on your style or approach to
writing in the pre-writing stage of your writing process. For some writers, the key is writing down all of the relevant
issues in a series of phrases or words that express some greater idea. For others, this process involves a collection of
information in the form of sentences. Whatever your method for prewriting, this part of paragraph development cannot
be avoided. Often, these prewriting efforts become the first signs of development. Building paragraphs can be just as
involved as building a major skyscraper: there must be a careful foundation that supports each paragraph just as there
must be a careful foundation that supports each building. Any cracks, inconsistencies, or other corruptions of the
foundation can cause the whole paper to crumble.


Every paragraph in a paper should be
Unified - The sentences should all refer to the main idea, or thesis, of the paper (Rosen and Behrens 119).
Coherent-The sentences should be arranged in a logical manner and should follow a definite plan for
development (Rosen and Behrens 119).
Well-Developed - Every idea discussed in the paragraph should be adequately explained and supported
through evidence and details that work together to explain the paper's controlling idea (Rosen and Behrens
119).
5-step process to paragraph development
1. Controlling idea- the expression of the main idea, topic, or focus of the paragraph in a sentence or a collection of
sentences.
Paragraph development begins with the formulation of the controlling idea. This idea directs the paragraph's
development. Often, the controlling idea of a paragraph will appear in the form of a topic sentence. A topic
sentence announces and controls the content of a paragraph (Rosen and Behrens 122). Topic sentences can
occur at four major points in a paragraph: the beginning of the paragraph, the middle of the paragraph, the end
of the paragraph, or at both the beginning and the end of the paragraph. Here's how you might begin a
paragraph on handing in homework:
Idea - Learning how to turn in homework assignments on time is one of the invaluable skills that college students can take with them into
the working world.
2. Explanation of controlling idea- the writer's rationale into his/her thinking about the main topic, idea, or focus of
the paragraph
Paragraph development continues with an expression of the rationale or the explanation that the writer gives
for how the reader should interpret the information presented in the idea statement or topic sentence of the
paragraph. Here's the sentence that would follow the controlling idea about homework deadlines:
Explanation - Though the workforce may not assign homework to its workers in the traditional sense, many of the objectives and jobs that
need to be completed require that employees work with deadlines. The deadlines that students encounter in the classroom may be different in
content when compared to the deadlines of the workforce, but the importance of meeting those deadlines is the same. In fact, failure to meet
deadlines in both the classroom and the workforce can mean instant termination.
3. Example -- the example serves as a sign or representation of the relationship established in the idea and explanation
portions of the paragraph
Paragraph development progresses with the expression of some type of support or evidence for the idea and
the explanation that came before it. Here are two examples that you might use to follow the homework
deadline explanation:
Example A--For example, in the classroom, students form a contract with the teacher and the university when they enroll in a class. That
contract requires that students complete the assignments and objectives set forth by the course's instructor in a specified time to receive a grade
and credit for the course.
Example B--Accordingly, just as a student risks termination in the classroom if he/she fails to meet the deadline for a homework
assignment, so, too, does that student risk termination in the workforce.


4. Explanation (of example) - the reasoning behind why you chose to use this/or these particular examples as
evidence to support the major claim, or focus, in your paragraph.
The next movement in paragraph development is an explanation of each example and its relevance to the topic
sentence and rationale given at the beginning of the paragraph. This pattern continues until all points/examples
that the reader deems necessary have been made and explained. NONE of your examples should be left
unexplained; the relationship between the example and the idea should always be expressed. Look at these two
explanations for examples in the homework deadline paragraph:
Explanation for example A--When a student fails to complete those assignments by the deadline, the student breaks her contract with
the university and the teacher to complete the assignments and objectives of the course. This often leaves the teacher with no recourse than to fail
the student and leaves the university with no other recourse than to terminate the student's credit for the course.
Explanation for Example B--A former student's contract with his/her employer functions in much the same way as the contract that
student had with his/her instructor and with the university in a particular course.
5. Completion of Paragraph's idea or transitiong into next paragraph--a review for your reader about the relevance
of the information that you just discussed in the paragraph, or a transition or preparation for your reader for the
paragraph that follows.
The final movement in paragraph development involves tying up the loose ends of the paragraph--and
reminding the reader of the relevance of the information in this paragraph to the main or controlling idea of
the paper. You might feel more comfortable, however, simply transitioning your reader to the next
development in the next paragraph. Here's an example of a sentence that completes the homework deadlines
paragraph:
Idea-Developing good habits of turning in assignments in class now, as current students, will aid your performance and position as future
participants in the working world.
Notice that the example and explanation steps of this model (steps 3 and 4) can be repeated as needed. The
idea is that you continue to use this pattern until you have completely developed the main idea of the
paragraph.
Now here is a look at the completed paragraph:
Learning how to turn in homework assignments on time is one of the invaluable skills that college students can take with
them into the working world. Though the workforce may not assign homework to its workers in the traditional sense,
many of the objectives and jobs that need to be completed require that employees work with deadlines. The deadlines
that students encounter in the classroom may be different in content when compared to the deadlines of the workforce,
but the importance of meeting those deadlines is the same. In fact, failure to meet deadlines in both the classroom and
the workforce can mean instant termination. For example, in the classroom, students form a contract with the teacher
and the university when they enroll in a class. That contract requires that students complete the assignments and
objectives set forth by the course's instructor in a specified time to receive a grade and credit for the course. Accordingly,
just as a student risks termination in the classroom if he/she fails to meet the deadline for a homework assignment, so,
too, does that student risk termination in the workforce. When a student fails to complete those assignments by the
deadline, the student breaks her contract with the university and the teacher to complete the assignments and objectives
of the course. This often leaves the teacher with no other recourse than to fail the student and leaves the university with
no other recourse than to terminate the student's credit for the course. Developing good habits of turning in
assignments in class now, as current students, will aid your performance and position as future participants in the
working world.



Beneath the Formula for Paragraph Development
There are some other central components of paragraph development that help to make this formula work. These
components are often overlooked, but developing the sentences that complete the steps of the paragraph development
process is not possible without these two components:
1) Topic Sentences - A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main idea of a paragraph. It tells the reader what
to expect about the information that will follow. Without the use of a topic sentence, developing a paragraph can be
extremely difficult. Topic sentences can appear at several points in a paragraph:
the beginning of the paragraph
the middle of the paragraph
the end of the paragraph
the beginning and the end of the paragraph
*Notice how the development of the paragraph (in the 5-Step example above) is framed by two topic sentences
(beginning and end) which work to reinforce the same idea and close the discussion and multiple examples given by the
writer.)
Here is an example of a topic sentence in the middle of a paragraph (in bold print):
Homework is one of those necessary evils of being a student. The one sure way that a teacher knows how to measure
your progress in his/her course is to assign homework that tests your knowledge of the information that is taught. Some
instructors, however, seem to use homework as a way of reassuring themselves that they have "taught" the information
to the students. Many students, aware of these ideas about homework, tend to treat homework as a chore, putting little
or no thought into the work that is turned in. However, like any designated task, homework is a reflection not
only on you as a student, but also on you as an individual. When an employer has to decide whether or not to hire
you, he or she has to consider your ability to complete the demands of the working world. For many employers, the way
that you handle your "homework" in college often indicates the way that you will handle your homework on the job. For
example, often your grade in a class is determined by the quality of the homework that you do. That homework grade
can be a significant part of your final grade for the course. In fact, many students can attest to an experience where the
homework grade made the difference in their final course grade. Once you leave college and attempt to find a job, those
homework grades translate into final GPAs for your major. Those final GPAs show up on rsums and job applications
and employers look to see if you have done your "homework" in school as a key factor in determining if you will do
your "homework" on the job.
2) Transitions (see our separate handout on transitions) - Transitions come in the form of single words, phrases,
sentences, and even whole paragraphs. They help to establish relationships between ideas in a paragraph and to create a
logical progression of those ideas in a paragraph. Without transitions, your paragraph will not be unified, coherent, or
well developed. Look at the following paragraph and the transitions that it uses from idea to idea (in bold print):
Juggling the demands of a job with the demands of being a full-time student makes good academic performance
difficult. Many students are forced to choose between good work on the job and good work in the classroom. Often,
good work in the classroom is compromised for good work on the job because the job pays the rent. In addition, those
students who do manage to perform well in both areas usually do so at the expense of their health. For example, several
students complain of the inability to handle the stress of both a job and school. In fact, the stress of both can often
cause headaches, dizziness, fatigue, and other ailments which slow the body down and prevent adequate performance in
either area. To eliminate the threat of being in the middle between job and school, students have to form a balance
between the demands of work and the demands of the classroom. Ultimately, managing your time more effectively,
working the same number of hours in smaller chunks, and planning ahead can all help in alleviating some of the stress to
the body and to the mind.


In Review
Paragraph development is more than just a few sentences that occupy the same space in a paper, it is an organic process
that makes intricate links between various ideas. These links, ultimately, create one single idea that runs throughout the
entire paper. There are many different components of the paragraph development model. All of your paragraphs should
have one central idea, the idea should have a discussion of how it works, the explanation should be shown in an
example, the example should be explained, and the final idea should be reiterated while preparing the reader for the
development to come. Awareness and utilization of all of these components will help to make your paragraphs more
unified, more coherent, and most importantly, better developed.
More Help
For a further discussion of paragraph development on the thesis level, refer to two Writing Center handouts: Constructing
Thesis Statements and Developing the Thesis Paragraph. For more help with topic sentences and transitions refer to the Writing
Center's Transitions handout.
Bibliography
Lunsford, Andrea and Robert Collins. The St. Martin's Handbook--Annotated Instructor's Edition. 5th Ed. New York: St.
Martin's, 2003. [not in UNC libraries; available on Writing Center bookshelf]
Rosen, Leonard and Laurence Behrens. The Allyn and Bacon Handbook--Annotated Instructor's Edition. 4th Ed. Boston: Allyn
and Bacon, 2000. [not in UNC libraries; available on Writing Center bookshelf]


Transitions
In this crazy, mixed-up, topsy-turvy world of ours, transitions glue our ideas and our essays together. This handout
enlists you in the cause.
The Function and Importance of Transitions
In both academic writing and professional writing, your goal is to convey information clearly and concisely, if not to
convert the reader to your way of thinking. Transitions help you to achieve these goals by establishing logical
connections between sentences, paragraphs, and sections of your papers. In other words, transitions tell readers what to
do with the information you present them. Whether single words, quick phrases or full sentences, they function as signs
for readers that tell them how to think about, organize, and react to old and new ideas as they read through what you
have written.
Transitions signal relationships between ideas such as: "Another example coming up--stay alert!" or "Here's an exception
to my previous statement" or "Although this idea appears to be true, here's the real story." Basically, transitions provide
the reader with directions for how to piece together your ideas into a logically coherent argument. Transitions are not
just "window dressing" that embellish your paper by making it sound or read better. They are words with particular
meanings that tell the reader to think and react in a particular way to your ideas. In providing the reader with these
important cues, transitions help readers understand the logic of how your ideas fit together.
Organization
Since the clarity and effectiveness of your transitions will depend greatly on how well you have organized your paper,
you may want to evaluate your paper's organization before you work on transitions. In the margins of your draft,
summarize in a word or short phrase what each paragraph is about or how it fits into your analysis as a whole. This
exercise should help you to see the order of and connection between your ideas more clearly.
If after doing this exercise you find that you still have difficulty linking your ideas together in a coherent fashion, your
problem may not be with transitions but with organization. For help in this area, please see the Writing Center's handout
on organization and/or make an appointment to see a tutor.
How Transitions Work
The organization of your written work includes two elements: (1) the order in which you have chosen to present the
different parts of your discussion or argument, and (2) the relationships you construct between these parts. Transitions
cannot substitute for good organization, but they can make this organization clearer and easier to follow. The following
example should help to make this point clear.
El Pais, a Latin American country, has a new democratic government after having been a dictatorship for many years.
Assume that you want to argue that El Pais is not as democratic as the conventional view would have us believe. One
way to effectively organize your argument would be to present the conventional view and then to provide the reader
with your critical response to this view. So, in Paragraph A you would want to enumerate all the reasons that someone
might consider El Pais highly democratic, while in Paragraph B you would want to refute these points. The transition


that would establish the logical connection between these two key elements of your argument would indicate to the
reader that the information in paragraph B contradicts the information in paragraph A. As a result, you might organize
your argument, including the transition that links paragraph A with paragraph B, in the following manner:
Paragraph A: points in support of the view that El Pais's new government is very democratic.
Transition: Despite the previous arguments, there are many reasons to think that El Pais's new government is
not as democratic as typically believed.
Paragraph B: points that contradict the view that El Pais's new government is very democratic.
In this case, the transition words "Despite the previous arguments," suggest that the reader should not believe paragraph
A and instead should consider the writer's reasons for viewing El Pais's democracy as suspect in the upcoming
paragraph.
As the previous example suggests, transitions can help reinforce the underlying logic of your paper's organization by
providing the reader with essential information regarding the relationship between your ideas. In this way, transitions act
as the glue that binds the components of your argument or discussion into a unified, coherent, and persuasive whole.
Types of Transitions
Now that you have a general idea of how to go about developing effective transitions in your writing, let us briefly
discuss the types of transitions your writing will use.
The types of transitions available to you are as diverse as the circumstances in which you need to use them. A transition
can be a single word, a phrase, a sentence, or an entire paragraph. In each case it functions the same way: first, the
transition either directly summarizes the content of a preceding sentence, paragraph, or section, or it implies that
summary. Then it helps the reader anticipate or comprehend the new information that you wish to present.
1. Transitions between Sections--Particularly in longer works, it may be necessary to include transitional
paragraphs that summarize for the reader the information just covered and specify the relevance of this
information to the discussion in the following section.
2. Transitions between Paragraphs--If you have done a good job of arranging paragraphs so that the content
of one leads logically to the next, the transition will highlight a relationship that already exists by summarizing
the previous paragraph and suggesting something of the content of the paragraph that follows. A transition
between paragraphs can be a word or two (however, for example, similarly), a phrase, or a sentence.
3. Transitions within Paragraphs--As with transitions between sections and paragraphs, transitions within
paragraphs act as cues by helping readers to anticipate what is coming before they read it. Within paragraphs,
transitions tend to be single words or short phrases.
Transitional Expressions
Effectively constructing each transition often depends upon your ability to identify words or phrases that will indicate
for the reader the kind of logical relationships you want to convey. The table below should make it easier for you to find
these words or phrases. Whenever you have trouble finding a word, phrase, or sentence to serve as an effective
transition, refer to the information in the table for assistance. Look in the left column of the table for the kind of logical
relationship you are trying to express. Then look in the right column of the table for examples of words or phrases that
express this logical relationship.


LOGICAL RELATIONSHIP TRANSITIONAL EXPRESSION
Similarity also, in the same way, just as ... so too,
likewise, similarly
Exception/Contrast but, however, in spite of, on the one
hand ... on the other hand,
nevertheless, nonetheless,
notwithstanding, in contrast, on the
contrary, still, yet
Sequence/Order first, second, third, ... next, then, finally
Time after, afterward, at last, before,
currently, during, earlier, immediately,
later, meanwhile, now, recently,
simultaneously, subsequently, then
Example for example, for instance, namely,
specifically, to illustrate
Emphasis even, indeed, in fact, of course, truly
Place/Position above, adjacent, below, beyond, here, in
front, in back, nearby, there
Cause and Effect accordingly, consequently, hence, so,
therefore, thus
Additional Support or Evidence additionally, again, also, and, as well,
besides, equally important, further,
furthermore, in addition, moreover,
then
Conclusion/Summary finally, in a word, in brief, in
conclusion, in the end, in the final
analysis, on the whole, thus, to
conclude, to summarize, in sum, in
summary



Conclusions
This handout will explain the functions of conclusions, offer strategies for writing effective ones, help you evaluate your
drafted conclusions, and suggest conclusion strategies to avoid.
About Conclusions
Introductions and conclusions can be the most difficult parts of papers to write. While the body is often easier to write,
it needs a frame around it. An introduction and conclusion frame your thoughts and bridge your ideas for the reader.
Just as your introduction acts as a bridge that transports your readers from their own lives into the "place" of your
analysis, your conclusion can provide a bridge to help your readers make the transition back to their daily lives. Such a
conclusion will help them see why all your analysis and information should matter to them after they put the paper
down.
Why bother writing a good conclusion?
Your conclusion is your chance to have the last word on the subject. The conclusion allows you to have the
final word on the issues you have raised in your paper, to summarize your thoughts, to demonstrate the
importance of your ideas, and to propel your reader to a new view of the subject. It is also your opportunity to
make a good final impression and to end on a positive note.
Your conclusion can go beyond the confines of the assignment. The conclusion pushes beyond the boundaries
of the prompt and allows you to consider broader issues, make new connections, and elaborate on the
significance of your findings.
Your conclusion should make your readers glad they read your paper. Your conclusion gives your reader
something to take away that will help them see things differently or appreciate your topic in personally relevant
ways. It can suggest broader implications that will not only interest your reader, but also enrich your reader's
life in some way. It is your gift to the reader.
Strategies for Writing an Effective Conclusion
One or more of the following strategies may help you write an effective conclusion.
Play the "So What" Game. If you're stuck and feel like your conclusion isn't saying anything new or interesting,
ask a friend to read it with you. Whenever you make a statement from your conclusion, ask the friend to say,
"So what?" or "Why should anybody care?" Then ponder that question and answer it. Here's how it might go:
You: Basically, I'm just saying that education was important to Douglass.
Friend: So what?
You: Well, it was important because it was a key to him feeling like a free and equal citizen.


Friend: Why should anybody care?
You: That's important because plantation owners tried to keep slaves from being educated so that they could maintain control.
When Douglass obtained an education, he undermined that control personally.
You can also use this strategy on your own, asking yourself "So What?" as you develop your ideas or your draft.
Return to the theme or themes in the introduction. This strategy brings the reader full circle. For example, if
you begin by describing a scenario, you can end with the same scenario as proof that your essay is helpful in
creating a new understanding. You may also refer to the introductory paragraph by using key words or parallel
concepts and images that you also used in the introduction.
Synthesize, don't summarize: Include a brief summary of the paper's main points, but don't simply repeat
things that were in your paper. Instead, show your reader how the points you made and the support and
examples you used fit together. Pull it all together for them.
Include a provocative insight or quotation from the research or reading you did for your paper.
Propose a course of action, a solution to an issue, or questions for further study. This can redirect your reader's
thought process and help her to apply your info and ideas to her own life or to see the broader implications.
Point to broader implications. For example, if your paper examines the Greensboro sit-ins or another event in
the Civil Rights Movement, you could point out its impact on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. A paper
about the style of writer Virginia Woolf could point to her influence on other writers or on later feminists.
Strategies to Avoid
Beginning with an unnecessary, overused phrase such as "in conclusion," "in summary," or "in closing."
Although these phrases can work in speeches, they come across as wooden and trite in writing.
Stating the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion.
Introducing a new idea or subtopic in your conclusion.
Ending with a rephrased thesis statement without any substantive changes.
Making sentimental, emotional appeals (out of character with the rest of an analytical paper).
Including evidence (quotations, statistics, etc.) that should be in the body of the paper.
Four Kinds of Ineffective Conclusions
1. The "That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It" Conclusion. This conclusion just restates the thesis and is usually
painfully short. It does not push the ideas forward. People write this kind of conclusion when they can't think
of anything else to say. Example: In conclusion, Frederick Douglass was, as we have seen, a pioneer in
American education, proving that education was a major force for social change with regard to slavery.
2. The "Sherlock Holmes: Conclusion. Sometimes writers will state the thesis for the very first time in the
conclusion. You might be tempted to use this strategy if you don't want to give everything away too early in
your paper. You may think it would be more dramatic to keep the reader in the dark until the end and then
"wow" her with your main idea, much like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The reader, however, does not expect a
mystery, but an analytical discussion of your topic in an academic style, with the main argument (thesis) stated
up front. Example: (After a paper that lists numerous incidents from the book but never says what these
incidents reveal about Douglass and his views on education): So, as the evidence above demonstrates, Douglass
saw education as a way to undermine the slaveholders' power and also an important step toward freedom.
3. The "America the Beautiful"/"I Am Woman"/"We Shall Overcome" Conclusion. This kind of conclusion
usually draws on emotion to make its appeal, but while this emotion and even sentimentality may be very
heartfelt, it is usually out of character with the rest of an analytical paper. A more sophisticated commentary,
rather than emotional praise, would be a more fitting tribute to the topic. Bad Example: Because of the efforts


of fine Americans like Frederick Douglass, countless others have seen the shining beacon of light that is
education. His example was a torch that lit the way for others. Frederick Douglass was truly an American hero.
4. The "Grab Bag" Conclusion. This kind of conclusion includes extra information that the writer found or
thought of but couldn't integrate into the main paper. You may find it hard to leave out details that you
discovered after hours of research and thought, but adding random facts and bits of evidence at the end of an
otherwise-well-organized essay can just create confusion. Bad Example: In addition to being an educational
pioneer, Frederick Douglass provides an interesting case study for masculinity in the American South. He also
offers historians an interesting glimpse into slave resistance when he confronts Covey, the overseer. His
relationships with female relatives reveal the importance of family in the slave community.
Sources
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, edited and with introduction by Houston
A. Baker, Jr., New York: Penguin Books, 1986. http://www.toptags.com/aama/books/book10.htm
Strategies for Writing a Conclusion. Literacy Education Online, St. Cloud State University. 18 May 2005
<http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html>.
Conclusions. Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center, Hamilton College. 17 May 2005
<http://www.hamilton.edu/academic/Resource/WC/SampleConclusions.html>.



XVI. Excerpts from Professional Literary
Criticism



Gender and Authorial Limitation In Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily."
(Special Issue: William Faulkner)
Faulkner's extensive authorial power in "A Rose for Emily" looms evident in the design of a large Southern gothic
house, in the outline of three complex generations of a Southern community, and in the development of a plot that
dutifully weaves and unweaves a mystery through a limited omniscient point of view. However, Faulkner also reveals
and revels in an authorial lack of knowledge when presented with writing a "lady" into a patriarchal Southern text.
Although sole author of "A Rose for Emily," this writer knows little about what went on in his lady's, Miss Emily
Grierson's, household. Knowledge of Emily proves unavailable to him (and consequently to the reader) for about thirty
years before we meet her -- before her father dies and lets her out of the house -- and also for the last twenty-seven years
of her life. He writes, "her front door remained closed,"(1) and with these words, he both instigates and reveals an
extended period of limited knowledge.
William Faulkner opens "A Rose for Emily" with a lengthy fifty-six-word single sentence that both encapsulates a
community's reaction to death and displays an immediate authorial compulsion to describe a scene through gender
differences. This author situates his story in a line-up of men and women conjoined in the desire to attend Miss Emily's
funeral but divided in the motivation assigned by the author:
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful
affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no
one save an old manservant -- a combined gardener and cook -- had seen in at least ten years. (p. 119)
Gender motivation splits between respect and curiosity, affection for a representation and intention to view the insides
of a house. The subordinate object of the sentence is "Miss Emily," the woman who provides the reason to feel
"affection" and to "see," and "our whole town" hovers as subject of the sentence. The stylistics of Faulkner's language
thus serves to subordinate Emily, ostensibly the subject of the tale, and to elevate the town as the truer subject.
Reading Emily as subordinate subject matter to the town renders peripheral much criticism regarding the story, for most
of the scholarship addresses the motives for Emily's actions toward Homer Barron. These motives range from sexual
repression and Oedipal issues to provision of symbols designating the passing of the Old South to the new.(2) While
scholars have treated the story as a murder mystery and have struggled with the revelation of Emily's "secret," a more
pervasive secret reigns over the story: why does Faulkner create a narrator with indefinable gender to tell this particular
story?
Until recently the narrator has been relegated to a marginal place of importance in the tale. Hal Blythe's 1988 essay offers
provocative discussion of the narrator; however, Blythe assumes the narrator to be male.(3) Michael Burduck's 1990
essay critiques Blythe's article on exactly this count and argues for a female narrator.(4) Both of these approaches
preserve the binary positions that words such as "male" and "female" signify in language. Because Faulkner has left the
gender of the narrator undetermined in the text, it seems that postmodern critics assume he meant one or the other and
that part of the conundrum of the tale is to solve the gender of the narrator. The often unspoken concern underlying the
quest for gender resolution in this tale is Faulkner's "feminism."
The question of the canonized male writer's relationship to feminism proves vastly complicated. Laura Claridge and
Elizabeth Langland, in their 1990 groundbreaking work, Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, point
out the complex layers of this difficult question:
. . . to write against patriarchy as a male fettered by it does not necessarily result in writing for liberation of
gender bondage, a primary aim of philosophical and practical feminism. `Feminist' tends to imply a political
agenda -- the granting of full economic, political, and social equality to women. It implies as well a commitment


to a woman's autonomy and a recognition of her individual and independent importance. Although many male
writers are interested in a space or possibility for expression coded as `feminine,' they are not necessarily
interested in particular women and their plights -- or even the general plight of the generic `woman.' A male
writer may simply need the space of what he or his culture terms the feminine in which to express himself
more fully because he experiences the patriarchal construction of his masculinity as a construction. He may,
that is, appropriate the feminine to enlarge himself, a process not incompatible with contempt for actual
women.(5)
From "our whole town" emerges the narrator of the story who poses an interesting limited omniscient narrating position
for Faulkner to control. The author designates this narrator both as part of the "our whole town" and part of the
supposed objectivity through whom the reader must envision the story.
Faulkner designs this narrative position as a reflection of his own stance toward patriarchal societal structures and
toward classic realist fiction. He stands firmly within the constructs, yet by calling attention to this vantage point and its
inadequacies, by deploying a bisexual narration into the text, and by presenting Emily's house both as intimate space for
the character as well as impregnable barrier to its own author/creator, Faulkner dismantles the structure of classic realist
fiction. Both narrator and author participate in and attempt to render beyond the powerful systems that construct them.
Faulkner's narrator suggests an authorial bisexuality through use of a disengendered pronoun; the gender of the narrator
remains unclear throughout the story. We do not know immediately whether this narrator feels affection toward or turns
a curious eye on Miss Emily and the funeral events, and these options provide the engendered distinctions suggested by
Faulkner at the beginning of the tale. More importantly, we do not know whether he or she proves capable of both
motivations while participating in the passing away of Emily Grierson and in ascertaining fragments of her past.
Minrose C. Gwin suggests Faulkner's capabilities of exacerbating male and female elements in the self and in writing as a
bisexual connection to his female subjects and to their power as disruptive agents in a text.(6) The bisexual possibilities
housed in the narrator of "A Rose for Emily" reflect just such capabilities in Faulkner and attest to his attempts to
interrogate the gender control inherent in authorship. In choosing to disengender the narrator pronoun, Faulkner offers
what Catherine Belsey refers to as an "implicit critique" about the "nature of fiction" itself.(7) "A Rose for Emily" asserts
that gender often controls the eye of a story, but it does not necessarily control the behavior of a character when he or
she remains out of sight.
By not outwardly claiming an engendered visionary stance for his or her embodiment, the narrator also creates a bisexual
oscillation in language. This particular narrator creates the "permanent state of tension" defined by bisexual writing: "it is
generated and regenerated by an interaction between the feminine and masculine, between self and other" (Gwin, p. 10).
In such writing, the woman character must "traverse the spaces between presence and absence, between her own
subjectivity and her bounded status in male discourse" (p. 14), and Emily does just that. She abides Faulkner's attempts
to write her life and the narrator's attempts to speak her life; she lives her life in the white space of the page. While
Faulkner busily writes and the narrator dutifully tells, Emily craftily arranges -- remember that she has an artistic flair
exhibited in her china-painting lessons -- skeletal bone and one single hair into an image to display at the end of the
story.
Although the reader witnesses Faulkner's words on the page and the scenes described by the narrator, he or she
witnesses nothing of the process of Emily's art. Emily thus remains present and absent simultaneously -- present when
Faulkner's words and the narrator's scenarios capture her, absent when the words cannot penetrate beyond the door
leading to her actions. Miss Grierson ultimately proves unrepresentable: a memory, an image, a nightmare, an inhabitant
of intimate space alone, a mind piece, a hyperbolic omission. And Faulkner ultimately asserts his powerlessness to
represent her.
The narrator does suggest that the community women at least understand the viability of secrets as regards Miss Emily
and her house. These women encourage the men to act upon their suspicions. The first concerns the smell that ensues
"after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart -- the one we believed would marry her -- had deserted


her." One of the neighbors (and Faulkner makes a specific point of its being a female neighbor) makes an issue of the
smell to the judge:
A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old. "But what will you have me
do about it madam?" he said. "Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law?" "I'm sure
that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the
yard. I'll speak to him about it." The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in
diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother
Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met -- three greybeards and
one younger man, a member of the rising generation. "It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her
place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't . . ." "Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said,
"will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" (p. 122)
At least three interesting issues arise from this passage. The judge only feels it necessary to act after a man complains,
but the fact remains that a woman initiated the idea of the smell. Both the man and the woman think that a "word"
would amend the situation. Inside the text, then, rests the thought that a word exists to facilitate a change regarding Miss
Emily's house; the men state it and the women state it. What this word might be goes unsaid, however. And finally, the
issue of the smell itself exudes from the house, from an intimate dwelling, and threatens to permeate the text. Faulkner
tries to penetrate this house with words, but he cannot find them. Instead he and Judge Stevens send men to cover over
the odor from outside the house. Neither proves ready to discover this particular intimacy.
Gaston Bachelard discusses odors and intimacy and houses. He says that only the dweller inside the house, alone, houses
the memories that belong to any particular house and are generated by any particular smell associated with the house.(8)
When the intimate goings-on inside Emily's house threaten to waft out into the neighborhood, the community wants it
covered with words, wants "a word" to stop what they reluctantly and repugnantly sense. Faulkner and the judge stop
the smell and the scene with lime, the word and the substance. Interestingly, the word "lime" has as one of its variant
meanings "to paint or cover a surface with a composition of lime and water; whitewash." Not only do these skulking
men rid the community of the smell, but they whitewash the source of the smell; they eliminate a sense. They protect
their "idol" standing in the window, and thereby collude in the night to comply with and to shield a lady and a murder
just as Faulkner colludes in protecting himself from knowing a woman like Emily by limiting her murderous activities to
those that take place behind doors he masterfully describes but refuses to penetrate.
In a pure and public patriarchy, no language exists to address the foul smell exuding from a woman's house. By
definition, a "lady" would not have such a house. To address Emily in such a way would have negated her standing as a
lady, and since destroying ladies proves undesirable in a patriarchy, only the option to collude unwittingly in her behavior
may be followed.
Faulkner's desire to get inside this house, yet his unwillingness or his inability simply to enter in while Emily lives,
establishes Emily as psycho-barrier. This woman thwarts Faulkner's ability to negotiate the intimate space he has, as
author, created to house her.
In order to demonstrate further his authorial lack, Faulkner lays bare the methods of creating classic realist fiction. As
Belsey reminds us, classic realism dominates as a literary form of the nineteenth century and arguably of the twentieth (p.
45), and it mainly entails the creation of an "enigma" who persistently calls attention to the cultural and signifying
systems, the inclusion of common plot focal points such as murder, the ongoing movement toward closure and
understanding for the reader, and reestablishment of an appropriate order within the plot.
In "A Rose for Emily," Faulkner abides by the form in that he provides Emily as enigma, Homer Barron's murder as
focal point, and the bisexual narrator to exhibit the conscious voice of the tale, but the revelation of Homer Barron's
skeleton, coupled with the gray hair at the end of the tale, affords an irregular closure and limited "knowingness" for the
reader. Although the story closes in the sense that its words cease, no mention of restoration of any order reveals itself
through the language of the tale. Faulkner stops writing, and the narrator stops narrating at the sight of the unlikely
coupling of the skeleton and the hair. The narrator sees but ceases to narrate at the sight.


The ideology that requires closure proves incapacitated by an author who forces his narrator to facilitate such a horror.
Faulkner thus dismantles the closure and the restoration of order required by classic realism. He also displays the limits
of his authority as omniscient creator. His text ends in awkward gawking; it ends in image and smell: the hair and an
acrid smell.
Faulkner subtly prepares the reader for the narrator's failure to relay what he sees in the mock-closing gesture by
gradually dismantling his or her perspective from a limited to a decidedly unwilling omniscience. The details required to
know something begin to evade the narrator as early as section Ill of the story. When Emily purchases the arsenic, the
druggist harbors a fear regarding the use to which Emily intends to put the poison. When the man asks her what she
wants it for,
Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for
eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The
Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. (p. 126)
The druggist has too much "affection" for her to "see" clearly what he saw in her eyes. He reveals the purchase to the
community members, and they collectively decide that she will commit suicide.
When Miss Emily clearly continues to live, the community refuses to invest in an alternative interpretation about the
arsenic. They simply forget it or suppress it. This druggist and the community members thus house information that our
narrator could pursue, but he or she does not. He or she remains too embedded in the construct of the community to
interrogate his neighbors, a reflection again of a Faulkner who remains too much embedded in the construct of
patriarchy to see a great distance beyond it.
In section IV of the story, the ladies coerce the Baptist minister into calling upon Miss Emily to discuss her gallivanting
in public with Homer Barron. The minister does visit her, and the narrator relates, "He would never divulge what
happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again" (p. 126). The minister knows something that the
narrator does not. A piece of information about an interaction with Emily lies trapped inside a character in the text,
never to be revealed. Our writer and our narrator do not retrieve it. Clearly, they privilege the harboring of information
over the gathering of knowledge.
In section V, the Negro manservant who lives with Miss Emily is never questioned as a source of knowledge. When
Miss Emily dies, "The Negro met the first ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and
their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not
seen again" (p. 129). He walks out of the story, most likely with crucial information, but being African-American and
thereby an insignificant part of the patriarchal design, his information remains unimportant, so the narrator lets him
leave. This narrator, even when confronted with the most exciting part of the mystery, refuses to participate on the front
lines. When the door to the bedroom housing the skeleton of Homer and the gray hair of Miss Emily is finally to be
forced open, the narrative "we" changes to the distant "they":
Already we [my italics] knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in orty
years, and which would have to be forced. They [my italics! waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground
before they opened it. (p. 129)
This narrator only wishes to be a reticent part of the discovery. He or she does not want to "know," nor to act. In this
way, Faulkner severely restricts even a limited narrative omniscience. Like the narrator, he has reservations about forcing
the door of knowledge, particularly as it regards gender and the death of a too familiar social structure.
Some of this concealment proves typical of the constraints imposed by the classic realist text:


The classic realist text is constructed on the basis of enigma. Information is initially withheld on condition of a
promise' to the reader that it will finally be revealed. The disclosure of this 'truth' brings the story to an end.
The movement of narrative is both towards disclosure--the end of the story--and towards concealment--
prolonging itself by delaying the end of the story through a series of 'reticences,' as Barthes calls them, snares
for the reader, partial answers to the questions raised, equivocations. (Belsey, pp. 55-56)
In "A Rose for Emily," however, the revelation of the skeleton and the hair discloses much more than any promise
offered or any question posed. Evidence of the murder indicts the community as accessories to the murder of Homer
Barron. This murder occurs in the white space of the text, behind the word "lady" and many other such words. No one
dares to investigate because a definition would have to be dismantled as well as an entire ideology. By refusing to
penetrate this word and to include in its meaning the possibility of committing murder, the entire community becomes
involved in a crime. Ignorance becomes criminal; not-knowing correlates with acts of collusion. This community allows
a human being to die in order to preserve themselves from the task of investigating a word, "lady," a woman, "Miss
Emily," and a world within a house.
The Emily on the page of the text proves a subversive cover for the activity occurring in the white space beneath the
eyes of the patriarchy. Emily does in fact exist while the patriarchal community is not looking. She exists inside her
house, and this house plays an intricate role in the authorial limitation presented by Faulkner. Negotiating the meaning
of images, of structures and particularly of intimate space provides the fundamental issue in this fiction. In queuing the
men and the women outside Emily's house, Faulkner demonstrates a polarity of interests that he encodes with differing
gender motivations. The men want to feel respect for a monument, a structure erected as representative of a human
being; the women want to see the inside of the house.
Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of space for the ability to "read a house," or to "read a room," "since both room
and house are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy" (p. 38). Accommodating
these terms to the Grierson house situates the grouping outside the structure as possible readers waiting for the text to
open. Faulkner thus sets up dual enigmas for the readers in the text and the readers of the text, that of Emily the
monument, and that of the house and its intimacies. In his gender division, he assigns men with concern for the enigma
and women with concern for intimacy. In his assignment of a disengendered pronoun to the narrator, the narrator
becomes a straddler perhaps interested in the monument and in the house. The men's affection renders the house
something larger than life; the women's curiosity renders the house an intimate container.
In choosing the Grierson house as that enigma about to be entered and discerned, Faulkner agrees to enter into intimate,
dynamic and revealing poetic space:
. . . the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.
The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different
dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. (Bachelard, p. 6)
Interestingly, in the first paragraph of the story, Faulkner aligns the community; in the second paragraph, he discusses
the outside of the house; and in the third paragraph, the house does exactly as Bachelard prescribes: it affords Faulkner
entrance to discussion of Emily's past. Thereby, the narrative of Emily's past intertwines with the present people aligned
to view her at her house. This supposed glance into Emily's life immediately becomes entangled with the lives of the
spectators themselves. The stories of the house will engulf and include them as they attempt to read.
Faulkner attempts in this collusive suggestion to ascertain the significance of wanting to know a secret about an other, an
Emily, but again as Bachelard points out, "All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without
ever being able to tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has total objectivity" (p. 13). Faulkner can only take the
reader on an approach toward the Grierson house, an intimate space filled with specific secrets, which affords readers
the possibility of an understanding of the patriarchal systems that awarded Emily her otherness. We think that the story,
in its classic realist fiction guise, will provide a revelation, a disclosure, but merely the evidence of at least one secret will
be revealed, the secret of the unknowables and the state of "being without" knowledge.


"Common sense" codes believed to be truths facilitate lack of knowledge. Codes about asking women questions,
assumptions about what a woman would use arsenic for, all are revealed for the fragile inabilities of each and every
person abiding patriarchal society to admit to the collusion in which they participate, to admit to the many murders of
personhood that occur beneath their noses--literally, Miss Emily's neighbors could have smelled this one--due to this
gap-filled framework:
Common sense consists of a number of social meanings and the particular ways of understanding the world
which guarantee them. These meanings, which inevitably favor the interests of particular social groups, become
fixed and widely accepted as true irrespective of sectional interests . . . . All common sense relies on a naive
view of language as transparent and true, undistorted by such things as 'ideology', a term which is reserved for
explanations representing opposed sectional interests. Common-sense knowledge is not a monolithic, fixed
body of knowledge. It is often contradictory and subject to change. It is not always necessarily conservative in
its implications. Its political effects depend on the particular context in which it is articulated. However, its
ower comes from its claim to be natural, obvious and therefore true.(9)
Faulkner writes, "[W]e had long though of [the Griersons] as a tableau" (p. 123); this collective type of thinking
represents a common sense about how to think of such a family. "So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we
were not pleased exactly, but vindicated . . . " (p. 123); the collective community even feels common emotions and
negates other emotions. "We did not say she was crazy then" (p. 124); a group will know by virtue of common sense
when craziness occurs. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing
left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will" (p. 124). The collective has a commonsense
memory and a common-sense rationale for Emily's behavior. This common-sense "we" even has access to the same set
of eyes: "When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those
angels in colored church windows -- sort of tragic and serene" (p. 124). It is common sense to see her this way;
everyone, "we," saw her this way.
The common-sense language in Faulkner designs the oppressive situation in which Emily had to live. Either a "we" or a
"they" designs language about her that contains and explains her actions. However, ultimately she acts and slips behind
this language. A common-sense language cannot write her. To write about her consistently, Faulkner would have had to
drop the common-sense language and to have entered the house during the time she lived there. To do so would have
been to penetrate the walls that protect a lady, and Faulkner does not grant himself such power. He opts for politeness
and lack of knowledge; to have proceeded otherwise would have constituted a language rape for a man invested in the
idea of a lady.
The common-sense level of the narrative language portrays a Faulkner writing Emily as a pivotal agent embodying the
end of the Old South. Such a language requires many skirtings, many unperused years, an unperused house, and many
unasked questions. Emily resists such purified symbol-making by leaving Homer Barron in the bcd with her hair, and
Faulkner resists the common-sense language by allowing the story to end in an image of words describing the body and
the hair. Ultimately Emily and Faulkner collude in dismantling the structures that bind one to a form of literature, to a
patriarchal structure, to a common-sense language.
In other words, Emily daily refuses to participate in the symbol-making of her as a precious lady of the Old South, an
idol, and icon. Although she has almost thirty years to bury Homer Barron in the ground, she simply does not. She keeps
him in the bcd and either sleeps with him throughout these years, or she artfully leaves the hair and crafts a pillow
indentation to signify the possibility that she could have done so behind the backs of the community and behind the
discourse that symbolized her. She becomes hyperbolic omission.
By admitting to not-knowing Emily, by leaving her to act beyond the language of the story, Faulkner subverts his own
discourse and displays the discourse for its constraining devices. Faulkner draws attention to the construct of gender as a
posture that infiltrates literature, affects and burdens its language, and adds non-negotiable layers to the ability to tell
stories. "As individuals we are not the mere objects of language but the sites of discursive struggle, a struggle which takes
place in the consciousness of the individual" (Weedon, p. 106). The unrepresentable Miss Emily acts as site for the


struggle to exist between the descriptive terms "idol" and "idle"--Miss Emily was neither--and William Faulkner designs
himself as disempowered authorial site struggling for a language that delivers anything like a lady to literary discourse.
(9) Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 77. (1) William
Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily," Collected Stories (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 128. (2) Dennis W. Allen, "Horror and
Perverse Delight: Faulkner's À Rose for Emily'," Modern Fiction Studies, 30 (Winter 1984), 688. (3) Hal Blythe, "The
Chivalric Narrator of À Rose for Emily'," University of Mississippi Studies in English, 6 (1988), 280-284. (4) Michael
Burduck, "Another View of Faulkner's Narrator in À Rose for Emily'." University of Mississippi Studies in English, 8
(1990), 209-211. (5) Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 3-4. (6) Minrose C. Gwin, 7he Feminine and Faulkner: Reading
(Beyond) Sexual Difference (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 10- 12. (7) Catherine Belsey,
"Constructing the Subject: deconstructing the text," in Feminist Criticism and Social Change, ed. Judith Newton and
Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 63. (8) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p.13.

Publisher Mississippi State University
Publication The Mississippi Quarterly

Subject Literature/writing
Format Magazine/Journal
ISSN 0026-637X
Issues per Year 4
Volume v47
Issue n3
Published 1994-06-22

Role Type Name
Author n/a Renee R. Curry

Person Criticism and interpretation William Faulkner



XVII. Short Stories



A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the
house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them
into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and
they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since
Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the
beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had
become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at
noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing
away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving
and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to
see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud,
who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his
enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his
wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to
the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a
mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth
in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away and sense of grandeur he might have
had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and
so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they
dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor's voice. That was how they
skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some
foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death
to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

"He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the
rain knocked him down."

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo's house. Against the
judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a spiritual
conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen,
armed with his bailiff's club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in
the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A
short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and
decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high
seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in
front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through
the openings in the wire as if weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o'clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous
than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive's future.
The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he
should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put
to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father
Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an


instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a
huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight
among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the
world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the
chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he
saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen
close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn
with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the
proud dignity of angels. The he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks
of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to
confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk
and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his
bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the
final verdict from the highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours
the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that
was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then
got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd
several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a
sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has
been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of
the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others
with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were
happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting
their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his
borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the
wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman,
were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the
pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man
that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the
first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples
pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him
to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with
an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke
with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which
brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world.
Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to
annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a her taking his ease but that of a
cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowd's frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival
of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their
time finding out in the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit
on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn't just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and
gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to the priest's tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the
traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to
see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of
questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her


horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending,
however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune.
While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents' house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back
through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in tow and
through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from
the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and
with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look
at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who
didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn't get to walk but almost won the lottery, and
the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already
ruined the angel's reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That
was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo's courtyard went back to being as empty as
during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion
with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn't get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the
windows so that angels wouldn't get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and have up his job as a bailiff
for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on
Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn't receive any
attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to
the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house
into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop.
But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth he'd gone
inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with
the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They
both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn't resist the
temptation to listen to the angel's heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys
that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They
seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn't understand why other men didn't have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken
coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the
bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time
that they grew to think that he'd be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the
exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and
his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare
cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the
shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an
old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even
the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained
motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of
December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like
another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that
no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One
morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas
blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so
clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down
with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn't get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude.
Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself
up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the
onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an
annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.


The Destructors
Graham Greene
It was on the eve of August Bank Holiday that the latest recruit became
the leader of the Wormsley Common Gang. No one was surprised
except Mike, but Mike at the age of nine was surprised by everything. 'If
you don't shut your mouth,' somebody once said to him, 'you'll get a frog
down it.' After that Mike kept his teeth tightly clamped except when the
surprise was too great.
The new recruit had been with the gang since the beginning of the
summer holidays, and there were possibilities about his brooding silence
that all recognized. He never wasted a word even to tell his name until
that was required of him by the rules. When he said 'Trevor' it was a
statement of fact, not as it would have been with the others a statement
of shame or defiance. Nor did anyone laugh except Mike, who finding
himself without support and meeting the dark gaze of the newcomer
opened his mouth and was quiet again. There was every reason why T., as
he was afterwards referred to, should have been an object of mockery -
there was his name (and they substituted the initial because otherwise
they had no excuse not to laugh at it), the fact that his father, a former
architect and present clerk, had 'come down in the world' and that his
mother considered herself better than the neighbours. What but an odd
quality of danger, of the unpredictable, established him in the gang without any ignoble ceremony of initiation?
The gang met every morning in an impromptu car-park, the site of the last bomb of the first blitz. The leader, who was
known as Blackie, claimed to have heard it fall, and no one was precise enough in his dates to point out that he would
have been one year old and fast asleep on the down platform of Wormsley Common Underground Station. On one side
of the car-park leant the first occupied house, No. 3, of the shattered Northwood Terrace - literally leant, for it had
suffered from the blast of the bomb and the side walls were supported on wooden struts. A smaller bomb and
incendiaries had fallen beyond, so that the house stuck up like a jagged tooth and carried on the further wall relics of its
neighbour, a dado, the remains of a fireplace. T., whose words were almost confined to voting 'Yes' or 'No' to the plan
of operations proposed each day by Blackie, once startled the whole gang by saying broodingly, 'Wren built that house,
father says.'
'Who's Wren?'
'The man who built St Paul's.'
'Who cares?' Blackie said. 'It's only Old Misery's.'
Old Misery - whose real name was Thomas - had once been a builder and decorator. He lived alone in the crippled
house, doing for himself: once a week you could see him coming back across the common with bread and vegetables,
and once as the boys played in the car-park he put his head over the smashed wall of his garden and looked at them.
'Been to the lav,' one of the boys said, for it was common knowledge that since the bombs fell something had gone
wrong with the pipes of the house and Old Misery was too mean to spend money on the property. He could do the
redecorating himself at cost price, but he had never learnt plumbing. The lav was a wooden shed at the bottom of the


narrow garden with a star-shaped hole in the door: it had escaped the blast which had smashed the house next door and
sucked out the window-frames of No. 3.
The next time the gang became aware of Mr Thomas was more surprising. Blackie, Mike and a thin yellow boy, who for
some reason was called by his surname Summers, met him on the common coming back from the market. Mr Thomas
stopped them. He said glumly, 'You belong to the lot that play in the car-park?'
Mike was about to answer when Blackie stopped him. As the leader he had responsibilities. 'Suppose we are?' he said
ambiguously.
'I got some chocolates,' Mr Thomas said. 'Don't like 'em myself. Here you are. Not enough to go round, I don't suppose.
There never is,' he added with sombre conviction. He handed over three packets of Smarties.
The gang was puzzled and perturbed by this action and tried to explain it away. 'Bet someone dropped them and he
picked 'em up,' somebody suggested.
'Pinched 'em and then got in a bleeding funk,' another thought aloud.
'It's a bribe,' Summers said. 'He wants us to stop bouncing balls on his wall.'
'We'll show him we don't take bribes,' Blackie said, and they sacrificed the whole morning to the game of bouncing that
only Mike was young enough to enjoy. There was no sign from Mr Thomas.
Next day T. astonished them all. He was late at the rendezvous, and the voting for that day's exploit took place without
him. At Blackie's suggestion the gang was to disperse in pairs, take buses at random and see how many free rides could
be snatched from unwary conductors (the operation was to be carried out in pairs to avoid cheating). They were drawing
lots for their companions when T. arrived.
'Where you been, T.?' Blackie asked. 'You can't vote now. You know the rules.'
'I've been there,' T. said. He looked at the ground, as though he had thoughts to hide.
'Where?'
'At Old Misery's.' Mike's mouth opened and then hurriedly closed again with a click. He had remembered the frog.
'At Old Misery's?' Blackie said. There was nothing in the rules against it, but he had a sensation that T. was treading on
dangerous ground. He asked hopefully, 'Did you break in?' 'No. I rang the bell.'
'And what did you say?'
'I said I wanted to see his house.' 'What did he do?'
'He showed it me:' 'Pinch anything?' 'No.'
'What did you do it for then?'
The gang had gathered round: it was as though an impromptu court were about to form and try some case of deviation.
T. said, 'It's a beautiful house,' and still watching the ground, meeting no one's eyes, he licked his lips first one way, then
the other.


'What do you mean, a beautiful house?' Blackie asked with scorn.
'It's got a staircase two hundred years old like a corkscrew. Nothing holds it up.'
'What do you mean, nothing holds it up. Does it float?' 'It's to do with opposite forces, Old Misery said.' 'What else?'
'There's panelling.' 'Like in the Blue Boar?' 'Two hundred years old.'
'Is Old Misery two hundred years old?'
Mike laughed suddenly and then was quiet again. The meeting was in a serious mood. For the first time since T. had
strolled into the car-park on the first day of the holidays his position was in danger. It only needed a single use of his real
name and the gang would be at his heels.
'What did you do it for?' Blackie asked. He was just, he had no jealousy, he was anxious to retain T. in the gang if he
could. It was the word 'beautiful' that worried him - that belonged to a class world that you could still see parodied at the
Wormsley Common Empire by a man wearing a top hat and a monocle, with a haw-haw accent. He was tempted to say,
'My dear Trevor, old chap,' and unleash his hell hounds. 'If you'd broken in,' he said sadly - that indeed would have been
an exploit worthy of the gang.
'This was better,' T. said. 'I found out things.' He continued to stare at his feet, not meeting anybody's eye, as though he
were absorbed in some dream he was unwilling - or ashamed to share.
'What things?'
'Old Misery's going to be away all tomorrow and Bank Holiday.'
Blackie said with relief, 'You mean we could break in?' 'And pinch things?' somebody asked.
Blackie said, 'Nobody's going to pinch things. Breaking in that's good enough, isn't it? We don't want any court stuff.'
'I don't want to pinch anything,' T. said. 'I've got a better idea.'
'What is it?'
T. raised eyes, as grey and disturbed as the drab August day. 'We'll pull it down,' he said. 'We'll destroy it.'
Blackie gave a single hoot of laughter and then, like Mike, fell quiet, daunted by the serious implacable gaze. 'What'd the
police be doing all the time?' he said.
'They'd never know. We'd do it from inside. I've found a way in.' He said with a sort of intensity, 'We'd be like worms,
don't you see, in an apple. When we came out again there'd be nothing there, no staircase, no panels, nothing but just
walls, and then we'd make the walls fall down - somehow.'
'We'd go to jug,' Blackie said.
'Who's to prove? and anyway we wouldn't have pinched anything.' He added without the smallest flicker of glee, 'There
wouldn't be anything to pinch after we'd finished.'
'I've never heard of going to prison for breaking things,' Summers said.


'There wouldn't be time,' Blackie said. 'I've seen housebreakers at work.'
'There are twelve of us,' T. said. 'We'd organize.! 'None of us know how...'
'I know,' T. said. He looked across at Blackie. 'Have you got a better plan?'
'Today,' Mike said tactlessly, 'we're pinching free rides. . ." 'Free rides,' T. said. 'Kid stuff. You can stand down, Blackie, if
you'd rather . . .'
'The gang's got to vote.' 'Put it up then.'
Blackie said uneasily, 'It's proposed that tomorrow and Monday we destroy Old Misery's house.'
'Here, here,' said a fat boy called Joe. 'Who's in favour?'
T. said, 'It's carried.'
'How do we start?' Summers asked.
'He'll tell you,' Blackie said. It was the end of his leadership. He went away to the back of the car-park and began to kick
a stone, dribbling it this way and that. There was only one old Morris in the park, for few cars were left there except
lorries: without an attendant there was no safety. He took a flying kick at the car and scraped a little paint off the rear
mudguard. Beyond, paying no more attention to him than to a stranger, the gang had gathered round T.; Blackie was
dimly aware of the fickleness of favour. He thought of going home, of never returning, of letting them all discover the
hollowness of TA leadership, but suppose after all what T. proposed was possible nothing like it had ever been done
before. The fame of the Wormsley Common car-park gang would surely reach around London. There would be
headlines in the papers. Even the grown-up gangs who ran the betting at the all-in wrestling and the barrow-boys would
hear with respect of how Old Misery's house had been destroyed. Driven by the pure, simple and altruistic ambition of
fame for the gang, Blackie came back to where T. stood in the shadow of Old Misery's wall.
T. was giving his orders with decision: it was as though this plan had been with him all his life, pondered through the
seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of puberty. 'You,' he said to Mike, 'bring some big nails, the
biggest you can find, and a hammer. Anybody who can, better bring a hammer and a screwdriver. We'll need plenty of
them. Chisels too. We can't have too many chisels. Can anybody bring a saw?'
'I can,' Mike said.
'Not a child's saw,' T. said. 'A real saw.'
Blackie realized he had raised his hand like any ordinary member of the gang.
'Right, you bring one, Blackie. But now there's a difficulty. We want a hacksaw.'
'What's a hacksaw?' someone asked.
'You can get 'em at Woolworth's,' Summers said.
The fat boy called Joe said gloomily, 'I knew it would end in a collection.'
'I'll get one myself,' T. said. 'I don't want your money. But I can't buy a sledge-hammer.'


Blackie said, 'They are working on No. 15. I know where they'll leave their stuff for Bank Holiday.'
'Then that's all,' T. said. 'We meet here at nine sharp.' 'I've got to go to church,' Mike said.
'Come over the wall and whistle. We'll let you in.'
On Sunday morning all were punctual except Blackie, even Mike. Mike had a stroke of luck. His mother felt ill, his father
was tired after Saturday night, and he was told to go to church alone with many warnings of what would happen if he
strayed. Blackie had difficulty in smuggling out the saw, and then in finding the sledge-hammer at the back of No. 15.
He approached the house from a lane at the rear of the garden, for fear of the policeman's beat along the main road. The
tired evergreens kept off a stormy sun: another wet Bank Holiday was being prepared over the Atlantic, beginning in
swirls of dust under the trees. Blackie climbed the wall into Misery's garden.
There was no sign of anybody anywhere. The lav stood like a tomb in a neglected graveyard. The curtains were drawn.
The house slept. Blackie lumbered nearer with the saw and the sledge-hammer. Perhaps after all nobody had turned up:
the plan had been a wild invention: they had woken wiser. But when he came close to the back door he could hear a
confusion of sound hardly louder than a hive in swarm: a clickety-clack, a bang bang, a scraping, a creaking, a sudden
painful crack. He thought: it's true; and whistled.
They opened the back door to him and he came in. He had at once the impression of organization, very different from
the old happy-go-lucky ways under his leadership. For a while he wandered up and down stairs looking for T. Nobody
addressed him: he had a sense of great urgency, and already he could begin to see the plan. The interior of the house was
being carefully demolished without touching the walls. Summers with hammer and chisel was ripping out the skirting-
boards in the ground floor dining-room: he had already smashed the panels of the door. In the same room Joe was
heaving up the parquet blocks, exposing the soft wood floorboards over the cellar. Coils of wire came out of the
damaged skirting and Mike sat; happily on the floor clipping the wires.
On the curved stairs two of the gang were working hard with an inadequate child's saw on the banisters - when they saw
Blackie's big saw they signalled for it wordlessly. When he next saw them a quarter of the banisters had been dropped
into the hall. He found T. at last in the bathroom - he sat moodily in the least cared-for room in the house, listening to
the sounds coming up from below.
'You've really done it,' Blackie said with awe. 'What's going to happen?'
'We've only just begun,' T. said. He looked at the sledgehammer and gave his instructions. 'You stay here and break the ,
bath and the wash-basin. Don't bother about the pipes. They come later.'
Mike appeared at the door. 'I've finished the wires, T.,' he said.
'Good. You've just got to go wandering round now. The kitchen's in the basement. Smash all the china and glass and
bottles you can lay hold of. Don't turn on the taps - we don't want a flood - yet. Then go into all the rooms and turn out
the drawers. If they are locked get one of the others to break them open. Tear up any papers you find and smash all the
ornaments. Better take a carving knife with you from the kitchen. The' bedroom's opposite here. Open the pillows and
tear up the sheets. That's enough for the moment. And you, Blackie, when you've finished in here crack the plaster in the
passage up with your sledge-hammer.'
'What are you going to do?' Blackie asked. 'I'm looking for something special,' T. said.
It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a
shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been
taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where


they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had
seen this house as it had now become.
Mike said, 'I've got to go home for dinner.'
'Who else?' T. asked, but all the others on one excuse or another had brought provisions with them.
They squatted in the ruins of the room and swapped unwanted sandwiches. Half an hour for lunch and they were at
work again. By the time Mike returned they were on the top floor, and by six the superficial damage was completed. The
doors were all off, all the skirtings raised, the furniture pillaged and ripped and smashed - no one could have slept in the
house except on a bed of broken plaster. T. gave his orders - eight o'clock next morning, and to escape notice they
climbed singly over the garden wall; into the car-park. Only Blackie and T. were left: the light had nearly gone, and when
they touched a switch, nothing worked - Mike had done his job thoroughly.
'Did you find anything special?' Blackie asked.
T. nodded. 'Come over here,' he said, 'and look.' Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. 'Old Misery's
savings,' he said. 'Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.'
'What are you going to do? Share them?'
'We aren't thieves,' T. said. 'Nobody's going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a
celebration.' He knelt down on the floor and counted them out - there were seventy in all. 'We'll burn them,' he said,
'one by one,' and taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly
towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. 'I'd like to see Old Misery's face
when we are through,' T. a said.
'You hate him a lot?' Blackie asked.
'Of course I don't hate him,' T. said. 'There'd be no fun if I hated him.' The last burning note illuminated his brooding
face. 'All this hate and love,' he said, 'it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie,' and he looked round the room
crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things. 'I'll race you home, Blackie,' he said.
Next morning the serious destruction started. Two were missing - Mike and another boy whose parents were off to
Southend and Brighton in spite of the slow warm drops that had begun to fall and the rumble of thunder in the estuary
like the first guns of the old blitz. 'We've got to hurry,' T. said.
Summers was restive. 'Haven't we done enough?' he asked. -, 'I've been given a _bob for slot machines. This is like
work.' 'We've hardly started,' T. said. 'Why, there's all the floors
left, and the stairs. We haven't taken out a single window. You voted like the others. We are going to destroy this house.
There; won't be anything left when we've finished.'
They began again on the first floor picking up the top floorboards next the outer wall, leaving the joists exposed. Then
they sawed through the joists and retreated into the hall, as what was left of the floor heeled and sank. They had learnt
with practice, and the second floor collapsed more easily. By the evening an odd exhilaration seized them as they looked
down the great hollow of the house. They ran risks and made mistakes: when they thought of the windows it was too
late to reach' them. 'Cor,' Joe said, and dropped a penny down into the, dry rubble-filled well. It cracked and span
amongst the broken glass.


'Why did we start this?' Summers asked with astonishment; T. was already on the ground, digging at the rubble, clearing
a space along the outer wall. 'Turn on the taps,' he said. 'It's too dark for anyone to see now, and in the morning it won't
matter.' The water overtook them on the stairs and fell through the floorless rooms.
It was then they heard Mike's whistle at the back. 'Something's wrong,' Blackie said. They could hear his urgent breathing
as they unlocked the door.
'The bogies?' Summers asked.
'Old Misery,' Mike said. 'He's on his way,' he said with pride. 'But why?' T. said. 'He told me ...' He protested with the
fury of the child he had never been, 'It isn't fair.'
'He was down at Southend,' Mike said, 'and he was on the train coming back. Said it was too cold and wet.' He paused
and gazed at the water. 'My, you've had a storm here. Is the roof leaking?'
'How long will he be?'
'Five minutes. I gave Ma the slip and ran.'
'We better clear,' Summers said. 'We've done enough, anyway.'
'Oh no, we haven't. Anybody could do this - ' 'this' was the shattered hollowed house with nothing left but the walls. Yet
walls could be preserved. Facades were valuable. They could build inside again more beautifully than before. This could
again be a home. He said angrily, 'We've got to finish. Don't move. Let me think.'
'There's no time,' a boy said.
'There's got to be a way,' T. said. 'We couldn't have got this far...'
'We've done a lot,' Blackie said.
'No. No, we haven't. Somebody watch the front' 'We can't do any more.'
'He may come in at the back.'
'Watch the back too.' T. began to plead. 'Just give me a minute and I'll fix it. I swear I'll fix it.' But his authority had gone
with his ambiguity. He was only one of the gang. 'Please,' he said.
'Please,' Summers mimicked him, and then suddenly struck home with the fatal name. 'Run along home, Trevor.'
T. stood with his back to the rubble like a boxer knocked groggy against the ropes. He had no words as his dreams
shook and slid. Then Blackie acted before the gang had time to laugh, pushing Summers backward. 'I'll watch the front,
T.,' he said, and cautiously he opened the shutters of the hall. The grey wet common stretched ahead, and the lamps
gleamed in the puddles. 'Someone's coming, T. No, it's not him. What's your plan, T.?'
'Tell Mike to go out to the lav and hide close beside it. When he hears me whistle he's got to count ten and start to
shout.' 'Shout what?'
'Oh, "Help", anything.'


'You hear; Mike,' Blackie said. He was the leader again. He took a quick look between the shutters. 'He's coming, T.'
'Quick, Mike. The lav. Stay here, Blackie, all of you; till I yell.'
'Where are you going, T.?'
'Don't worry. I'll see to this. I said I would, didn't I?'
Old Misery came limping off the common. He had mud on his shoes and he stopped to scrape them on the pavement's
edge. He didn't want to soil his house, which stood jagged and dark between the bomb-sites, saved so narrowly, as he
believed, from destruction. Even the fan-light had been left unbroken by the bomb's blast. Somewhere somebody
whistled. Old Misery looked sharply round. He didn't trust whistles. A child was shouting: it seemed to come from his
own garden. Then a boy ran into the road from the car-park. 'Mr Thomas,' he called, 'Mr Thomas.'
'What is it?'
'I'm terribly sorry, Mr Thomas. One of us got taken short, and we thought you wouldn't mind, and now he can't get out.'
'What do you mean, boy?'
'He's got stuck in your lav.'
'He'd no business ... Haven't I seen you before?' 'You showed me your house.'
'So I did. So I did. That doesn't give you the right to...
'Do hurry, Mr Thomas. He'll suffocate.'
'Nonsense. He can't suffocate. Wait till I put my bag in.' 'I'll carry your bag.'
'Oh no, you don't. I carry my own.' 'This way, Mr Thomas.'
'I can't get in the garden that way. I've got to go through the house.'
'But you can get in the garden this way, Mr Thomas. We often do.'
'You often do?' He followed the boy with a scandalized fascination. 'When? What right ?'
'Do you see ? the wall's low.'
'I'm not going to climb walls into my own garden. It's absurd.'
'This is how we do it. One foot here, one foot there, and over.' The boy's face peered down, an arm shot out, and Mr
Thomas found his bag taken and deposited on the other side of the wall.
'Give me back my bag,' Mr Thomas said. From the loo a boy yelled and yelled. 'I'll call the police.'
'Your bag's all right, Mr Thomas. Look. One foot there. On your right. Now just above. To your left.' Mr Thomas
climbed over his own garden wall. 'Here's your bag, Mr Thomas.'
'I'll have the wall built up,' Mr Thomas said, 'I'll not have you boys coming over here, using my loo.' He stumbled on the
path, but the boy caught his elbow and supported him. 'Thank you, thank you, my boy,' he murmured automatically.


Somebody shouted again through the dark. 'I'm coming, I'm coming,' Mr Thomas called. He said to the boy beside him,
'I'm not unreasonable. Been a boy myself. As long as things are done regular. I don't mind you playing round the place
Saturday mornings. Sometimes I like company. Only it's got to be regular. One of you asks leave and I say Yes.
Sometimes I'll say No. Won't feel like it. And you come in at the front door and out at the back. No garden walls.'
'Do get him out, Mr Thomas.'
'He won't come to any harm in my loo,' Mr Thomas said, stumbling slowly down the garden. 'Oh, my rheumatics,' h
said. 'Always get 'em on Bank Holiday. I've got to be careful. There's loose stones here. Give me your hand. Do you
know what my horoscope said yesterday? "Abstain from any dealings in first half of week. Danger of serious crash."
That might be on this path,' Mr Thomas said. 'They speak in parables and double meanings.' He paused at the door of
the loo. 'What's the matter in there?' he called. There was no reply.
'Perhaps he's fainted,' the boy said.
'Not in my loo. Here, you, come out,' Mr Thomas said, and giving a great jerk at the door he nearly fell on his back when
it swung easily open. A hand first supported him and then pushed him hard. His head hit the opposite wall and he sat
heavily down. His bag hit his feet. A hand whipped the key out of the lock and the door slammed. 'Let me out,' he
called, and heard the key turn in the lock. 'A serious crash,' he thought, and felt dithery and confused and old.
A voice spoke to him softly through the star-shaped hole in the door. 'Don't worry, Mr Thomas,' it said, 'we won't hurt
you, not if you stay quiet.'
Mr Thomas put his head between his hands and pondered. He had noticed that there was only one lorry in the car-park,
and he felt certain that the driver would not come for it before the morning. Nobody could hear him from the road in
front and the lane at the back was seldom used. Anyone who passed there would be hurrying home and would not pause
for what they would certainly take to be drunken cries. And if he did call 'Help', who, on a lonely Bank Holiday evening,
would have the courage to investigate? Mr Thomas sat on the loo and pondered with the wisdom of age.
After a while it seemed to him that there were sounds in the silence - they were faint and came from the direction of his
house. He stood up and peered through the ventilation-hole - between the cracks in one of the shutters he saw a light,
not the light of a lamp, but the wavering light that a candle might give. Then he thought he heard the sound of
hammering and scraping and chipping. He thought of burglars - perhaps they had employed the boy as a scout, but why
should burglars engage in what sounded more and more like a stealthy form of carpentry? Mr Thomas let out an
experimental yell, but nobody answered. The noise could not even have reached his enemies.
Mike had gone home to bed, but the rest stayed. The question of leadership no longer concerned the gang. With nails,
chisels, screwdrivers, anything that was sharp and penetrating, they moved around the inner walls worrying at the mortar
between the bricks. They started too high, and it was Blackie who hit on the damp course and realized the work could be
halved if they weakened the joints immediately above. It was a long, tiring, unamusing job, but at last it was finished. The
gutted house stood there balanced on a few inches of mortar between the clamp course and the bricks.
There remained the most dangerous task of all, out in the open at the edge of the bomb-site. Summers was sent to watch
the road for passers-by, and Mr Thomas, sitting on the loo, heard clearly now the sound of sawing. It no longer came
from the house, and that a little reassured him. He felt less concerned. Perhaps the other noises too had no significance.
A voice spoke to him through the hole. 'Mr Thomas.' 'Let me out,' Mr Thomas said sternly.
'Here's a blanket,' the voice said, and a long grey sausage was worked through the hole and fell in swathes over Mr
Thomas's head.
'There's nothing personal,' the voice said. 'We want you to be comfortable tonight.'


'Tonight,' Mr Thomas repeated incredulously.
'Catch,' the voice said. 'Penny buns - we've buttered them, and sausage-rolls. We don't want you to starve, Mr Thomas.'
Mr Thomas pleaded desperately. 'A joke's a joke, boy. Let me out and I won't say a thing. I've got rheumatics. I got to
sleep comfortable.'
'You wouldn't be comfortable, not in your house, you wouldn't. Not now.'
'What do you mean, boy?' But the footsteps receded. There was only the silence of night: no sound of sawing. Mr
Thomas tried one more yell, but he was daunted and rebuked by the silence - a long way off an owl hooted and made
away again on its muffled flight through the soundless world.
At seven next morning the driver came to fetch his lorry. He climbed into the seat and tried to start the engine. He was
vaguely aware of a voice shouting, but it didn't concern him. At last the engine responded and he backed the lorry until
it, touched the great wooden shore that supported Mr Thomas's house. That way he could drive right out and down the
street without reversing. The lorry moved forward, was momentarily checked as though something were pulling it from
behind, and then went on to the sound of a long rumbling crash. The driver was astonished to see bricks bouncing
ahead of him, while stones hit the roof of his cab. He put on his brakes. When he climbed out the whole landscape had
suddenly altered. There was no house beside the car-park, only a hill of rubble. He went round and examined the back of
his lorry for damage, and found a rope tied there that was still twisted at the other end round part of a wooden strut.
The driver again became aware of somebody shouting. It came from the wooden erection which was the nearest thing to
a house in that desolation of broken brick. The driver climbed the smashed wall and unlocked the door. Mr Thomas
came out of the loo. He was wearing a grey blanket to which flakes of pastry adhered. He gave a sobbing cry. 'My house,'
he said. 'Where's my house?'
'Search me,' the driver said. His eye lit on the remains of a bath and what had once been a dresser and he began to laugh.
There wasn't anything left anywhere.
'How dare you laugh,' Mr Thomas said. 'It was my house My house.'
'I'm sorry,' the driver said, making heroic efforts, but when he remembered the sudden check of his lorry, the crash of
bricks falling, he became convulsed again. One moment the house had stood there with such dignity between the bomb-
sites like a man in a top hat, and then, bang, crash, there wasn't anything left - not anything. He said, 'I'm sorry. I can't
help it, Mr Thomas. There's nothing personal, but you got to admit it's funny.'

Written 1954


Miss Brill
by Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
ALTHOUGH it was so brilliantly finethe blue sky powdered with
gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins
PubliquesMiss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air
was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a
faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and
now and again a leaf came driftingfrom nowhere, from the sky. Miss
Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice
to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken
out the moth powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back
into the dim little eyes. "What has been happening to me?" said the
sad little eyes. Oh, how sweet it was to see them snap at her again
from the red eiderdown! . . . But the nose, which was of some black composition, wasn't at all firm. It must have had a
knock, somehow. Never minda little dab of black sealing-wax when the time camewhen it was absolutely necessary . .
. Little rogue! Yes, she really felt like that about it. Little rogue biting its tail just by her left ear. She could have taken it
off and laid it on her lap and stroked it. She felt a tingling in her hands and arms, but that [Page 183] came from walking,
she supposed. And when she breathed, something light and sadno, not sad, exactlysomething gentle seemed to move
in her bosom.
There were a number of people out this afternoon, far more than last Sunday. And the band sounded louder and gayer.
That was because the Season had begun. For although the band played all the year round on Sundays, out of season it
was never the same. It was like some one playing with only the family to listen; it didn't care how it played if there
weren't any strangers present. Wasn't the conductor wearing a new coat, too? She was sure it was new. He scraped with
his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow, and the bandsmen sitting in the green rotunda blew out their
cheeks and glared at the music. Now there came a little "flutey" bitvery pretty!a little chain of bright drops. She was
sure it would be repeated. It was; she lifted her head and smiled.
Only two people shared her "special" seat: a fine old man in a velvet coat, his hands clasped over a huge carved walking-
stick, and a big old woman, sitting upright, with a roll of knitting on her embroidered apron. They did not speak. This
was disappointing, for Miss Brill always looked forward to the conversation. She had become really quite expert, she
thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round
her. [Page 184]
She glanced, sideways, at the old couple. Perhaps they would go soon. Last Sunday, too, hadn't been as interesting as
usual. An Englishman and his wife, he wearing a dreadful Panama hat and she button boots. And she'd gone on the
whole time about how she ought to wear spectacles; she knew she needed them; but that it was no good getting any;
they'd be sure to break and they'd never keep on. And he'd been so patient. He'd suggested everythinggold rims, the
kind that curve round your ears, little pads inside the bridge. No, nothing would please her. "They'll always be sliding
down my nose!" Miss Brill had wanted to shake her.
The old people sat on a bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always the crowd to watch. To and fro, in front of
the flower beds and the band rotunda, the couples and groups paraded, stopped to talk, to greet, to buy a handful of
flowers from the old beggar who had his tray fixed to the railings. Little children ran among them, swooping and
laughing; little boys with big white silk bows under their chins, little girls, little French dolls, dressed up in velvet and
lace. And sometimes a tiny staggerer came suddenly rocking into the open from under the trees, stopped, stared, as
suddenly sat down "flop," until its small high-stepping mother, like a young hen, rushed scolding to its rescue. Other
people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, [Page 185] and
Miss Brill had often noticedthere was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old,
and from the way they stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms or eveneven cupboards!


Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond
the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.
Tum-tum-tum tiddle-um! tiddle-um! tum tiddley-um tum ta! blew the band.
Two young girls in red came by and two young soldiers in blue met them, and they laughed and paired and went off
arm-in-arm. Two peasant women with funny straw hats passed, gravely, leading beautiful smoke-coloured donkeys. A
cold, pale nun hurried by. A beautiful woman came along and dropped her bunch of violets, and a little boy ran after to
hand them to her, and she took them and threw them away as if they'd been poisoned. Dear me! Miss Brill didn't know
whether to admire that or not! And now an ermine toque and a gentleman in gray met just in front of her. He was tall,
stiff, dignified, and she was wearing the ermine toque she'd bought when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair,
her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her
lips, was a tiny yellowish paw. Oh, she was so pleased to see himdelighted! She rather thought they were going [Page
186] to meet that afternoon. She described where she'd beeneverywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so
charmingdidn't he agree? And wouldn't he, perhaps? . . . But he shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a
great deep puff into her face, and even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the match away and walked on.
The ermine toque was alone; she smiled more brightly than ever. But even the band seemed to know what she was
feeling and played more softly, played tenderly, and the drum beat, "The Brute! The Brute!" over and over. What would
she do? What was going to happen now? But as Miss Brill wondered, the ermine toque turned, raised her hand as though
she'd seen someone else, much nicer, just over there, and pattered away. And the band changed again and played more
quickly, more gayly than ever, and the old couple on Miss Brill's seat got up and marched away, and such a funny old
man with long whiskers hobbled along in time to the music and was nearly knocked over by four girls walking abreast.
Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was
exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn't painted? But it wasn't till a little brown dog trotted on
solemn and then slowly trotted off, like a little "theatre" dog, a little dog that had been drugged, that Miss Brill
discovered what it was [Page 187] that made it so exciting. They were all on stage. They weren't only the audience, not
only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed
if she hadn't been there; she was part of the performance after all. How strange she'd never thought of it like that before!
And yet it explained why she made such point of starting from home at just the same time each weekso as not to be
late for the performanceand it also explained why she had a queer, shy feeling at telling her English pupils how she
spent her Sunday afternoons. No wonder! Miss Brill nearly laughed out loud. She was on the stage. She thought of the
old invalid gentleman to whom she read the newspaper four afternoons a week while he slept in the garden. She had got
quite used to the frail head on the cotton pillow, the hollowed eyes, the open mouth and the high pinched nose. If he'd
been dead she mightn't have noticed for weeks; she wouldn't have minded. But suddenly he knew he was having the
paper read to him by an actress! "An actress!" The old head lifted; two points of light quivered in the old eyes. "An
actressare ye?" And Miss Brill smoothed the newspaper as though it were the manuscript of her part and said gently;
"Yes, I have been an actress for a long time."
The band had been having a rest. Now they started again. And what they played was warm, [Page 188] sunny, yet there
was just a faint chilla something, what was it?not sadnessno, not sadnessa something that made you want to sing.
The tune lifted, lifted, the light shone; and it seemed to Miss Brill that in another moment all of them, all the whole
company, would begin singing. The young ones, the laughing ones who were moving together, they would begin and the
men's voices, very resolute and brave, would join them. And then she too, she too, and the others on the benchesthey
would come in with a kind of accompanimentsomething low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautifulmoving.
. . . And Miss Brill's eyes filled with tears and she looked smiling at all the other members of the company. Yes, we
understand, we understand, she thoughtthough what they understood she didn't know.
Just at that moment a boy and girl came and sat down where the old couple had been. They were beautifully dressed;
they were in love. The hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father's yacht. And still soundlessly singing, still
with that trembling smile, Miss Brill prepared to listen.
"No, not now," said the girl. "Not here, I can't."


"But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?" asked the boy. "Why does she come here at allwho wants
her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?" [Page 189]
"It's her fu-ur which is so funny," giggled the girl. "It's exactly like a fried whiting."
"Ah, be off with you!" said the boy in an angry whisper. Then: "Tell me, ma petite chre"
"No, not here," said the girl. "Not yet."
On her way home she usually bought a slice of honeycake at the baker's. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was
an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny
presenta surprisesomething that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and struck
the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way.
But to-day she passed the baker's by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark roomher room like a cupboardand sat
down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She
unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard
something crying.


A Perfect Day for Bananafish
J. D. Salinger

The New Yorker, January 31, 1948, pages 21-25
THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way
they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from
noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She
read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun-or Hell." She
washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She
moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in
her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window
seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.
She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her
phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.
With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of
her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up,
passed her left--the wet--hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray
from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of
the made-up twin beds and--it was the fifth or sixth ring--picked up the phone.
"Hello," she said, keeping the fingers of her left hand outstretched and away from her
white silk dressing gown, which was all that she was wearing, except mules--her rings
were in the bathroom.
"I have your call to New York now, Mrs. Glass," the operator said.
"Thank you," said the girl, and made room on the night table for the ashtray.
A woman's voice came through. "Muriel? Is that you?"
The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. "Yes, Mother. How are you?" she
said.
"I've been worried to death about you. Why haven't you phoned? Are you all right?"
"I tried to get you last night and the night before. The phone here's been--"
"Are you all right, Muriel?"
The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear. "I'm fine. I'm hot. This is the hottest day they've had in
Florida in--"
"Why haven't you called me? I've been worried to--"


"Mother, darling, don't yell at me. I can hear you beautifully," said the girl. "I called you twice last night. Once just after--
"
"I told your father you'd probably call last night. But, no, he had to-Are you all right, Muriel? Tell me the truth."
"I'm fine. Stop asking me that, please."
"When did you get there?"
"I don't know. Wednesday morning, early."
"Who drove?"
"He did," said the girl. "And don't get excited. He drove very nicely. I was amazed."
"He drove? Muriel, you gave me your word of--"
"Mother," the girl interrupted, "I just told you. He drove very nicely. Under fifty the whole way, as a matter of fact."
"Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?"
"I said he drove very nicely, Mother. Now, please. I asked him to stay close to the white line, and all, and he knew what I
meant, and he did. He was even trying not to look at the trees-you could tell. Did Daddy get the car fixed, incidentally?"
"Not yet. They want four hundred dollars, just to--"
"Mother, Seymour told Daddy that he'd pay for it. There's no reason for--"
"Well, we'll see. How did he behave--in the car and all?"
"All right," said the girl.
"Did he keep calling you that awful--"
"No. He has something new now."
"What?"
"Oh, what's the difference, Mother?"
"Muriel, I want to know. Your father--"
"All right, all right. He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948," the girl said, and giggled.
"It isn't funny, Muriel. It isn't funny at all. It's horrible. It's sad, actually. When I think how--"
"Mother," the girl interrupted, "listen to me. You remember that book he sent me from Germany? You know--those
German poems. What'd I do with it? I've been racking my--"


"You have it."
"Are you sure?" said the girl.
"Certainly. That is, I have it. It's in Freddy's room. You left it here and I didn't have room for it in the--Why? Does he
want it?"
"No. Only, he asked me about it, when we were driving down. He wanted to know if I'd read it."
"It was in German!"
"Yes, dear. That doesn't make any difference," said the girl, crossing her legs. "He said that the poems happen to be
written by the only great poet of the century. He said I should've bought a translation or something. Or learned the
language, if you please."
"Awful. Awful. It's sad, actually, is what it is. Your father said last night--"
"Just a second, Mother," the girl said. She went over to the window seat for her cigarettes, lit one, and returned to her
seat on the bed. "Mother?" she said, exhaling smoke.
"Muriel. Now, listen to me."
"I'm listening."
"Your father talked to Dr. Sivetski."
"Oh?" said the girl.
"He told him everything. At least, he said he did--you know your father. The trees. That business with the window.
Those horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing away. What he did with all those lovely pictures
from Bermuda--everything."
"Well?" said the girl.
"Well. In the first place, he said it was a perfect crime the Army released him from the hospital--my word of honor. He
very definitely told your father there's a chance--a very great chance, he said--that Seymour may completely lose control
of himself. My word of honor."
"There's a psychiatrist here at the hotel," said the girl.
"Who? What's his name?"
"I don't know. Rieser or something. He's supposed to be very good."
"Never heard of him."
"Well, he's supposed to be very good, anyway."
"Muriel, don't be fresh, please. We're very worried about you. Your father wanted to wire you last night to come home,
as a matter of f--"


"I'm not coming home right now, Mother. So relax."
"Muriel. My word of honor. Dr. Sivetski said Seymour may completely lose contr--"
"I just got here, Mother. This is the first vacation I've had in years, and I'm not going to just pack everything and come
home," said the girl. "I couldn't travel now anyway. I'm so sunburned I can hardly move."
"You're badly sunburned? Didn't you use that jar of Bronze I put in your bag? I put it right--"
"I used it. I'm burned anyway."
"That's terrible. Where are you burned?"
"All over, dear, all over."
"That's terrible."
"I'll live."
"Tell me, did you talk to this psychiatrist?"
"Well, sort of," said the girl.
"What'd he say? Where was Seymour when you talked to him?"
"In the Ocean Room, playing the piano. He's played the piano both nights we've been here."
"Well, what'd he say?"
"Oh, nothing much. He spoke to me first. I was sitting next to him at Bingo last night, and he asked me if that wasn't my
husband playing the piano in the other room. I said yes, it was, and he asked me if Seymour's been sick or something. So
I said--"
"Why'd he ask that?"
"I don't know, Mother. I guess because he's so pale and all," said the girl. "Anyway, after Bingo he and his wife asked me
if I wouldn't like to join them for a drink. So I did. His wife was horrible. You remember that awful dinner dress we saw
in Bonwit's window? The one you said you'd have to have a tiny, tiny--"
"The green?"
"She had it on. And all hips. She kept asking me if Seymour's related to that Suzanne Glass that has that place on
Madison Avenue--the millinery."
"What'd he say, though? The doctor."
"Oh. Well, nothing much, really. I mean we were in the bar and all. It was terribly noisy."
"Yes, but did--did you tell him what he tried to do with Granny's chair?"


"No, Mother. I didn't go into details very much," said the girl. "I'll probably get a chance to talk to him again. He's in the
bar all day long."
"Did he say he thought there was a chance he might get--you know--funny or anything? Do something to you!"
"Not exactly," said the girl. "He had to have more facts, Mother. They have to know about your childhood--all that stuff.
I told you, we could hardly talk, it was so noisy in there."
"Well. How's your blue coat?"
"All right. I had some of the padding taken out."
"How are the clothes this year?"
"Terrible. But out of this world. You see sequins--everything," said the girl.
"How's your room?"
"All right. Just all right, though. We couldn't get the room we had before the war," said the girl. "The people are awful
this year. You should see what sits next to us in the dining room. At the next table. They look as if they drove down in a
truck."
"Well, it's that way all over. How's your ballerina?"
"It's too long. I told you it was too long."
"Muriel, I'm only going to ask you once more--are you really all right?"
"Yes, Mother," said the girl. "For the ninetieth time."
"And you don't want to come home?"
"No, Mother."
"Your father said last night that he'd be more than willing to pay for it if you'd go away someplace by yourself and think
things over. You could take a lovely cruise. We both thought--"
"No, thanks," said the girl, and uncrossed her legs. "Mother, this call is costing a for--"
"When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war-I mean when you think of all those crazy little wives
who--"
"Mother," said the girl, "we'd better hang up. Seymour may come in any minute."
"Where is he?"
"On the beach."
"On the beach? By himself? Does he behave himself on the beach?"


"Mother," said the girl, "you talk about him as though he were a raving maniac--"
"I said nothing of the kind, Muriel."
"Well, you sound that way. I mean all he does is lie there. He won't take his bathrobe off."
"He won't take his bathrobe off? Why not?"
"I don't know. I guess because he's so pale."
"My goodness, he needs the sun. Can't you make him?
"You know Seymour," said the girl, and crossed her legs again. "He says he doesn't want a lot of fools looking at his
tattoo."
"He doesn't have any tattoo! Did he get one in the Army?"
"No, Mother. No, dear," said the girl, and stood up. "Listen, I'll call you tomorrow, maybe."
"Muriel. Now, listen to me."
"Yes, Mother," said the girl, putting her weight on her right leg.
"Call me the instant he does, or says, anything at all funny--you know what I mean. Do you hear me?"
"Mother, I'm not afraid of Seymour."
"Muriel, I want you to promise me."
"All right, I promise. Goodbye, Mother," said the girl. "My love to Daddy." She hung up.
"See more glass," said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. "Did you see more glass?"
"Pussycat, stop saying that. It's driving Mommy absolutely crazy. Hold still, please."
Mrs. Carpenter was putting sun-tan oil on Sybil's shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, winglike blades of her
back. Sybil was sitting insecurely on a huge, inflated beach ball, facing the ocean. She was wearing a canary-yellow two-
piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.
"It was really just an ordinary silk handkerchief--you could see when you got up close," said the woman in the beach
chair beside Mrs. Carpenter's. "I wish I knew how she tied it. It was really darling."
"It sounds darling," Mrs. Carpenter agreed. "Sybil, hold still, pussy."
"Did you see more glass?" said Sybil.
Mrs. Carpenter sighed. "All right," she said. She replaced the cap on the sun-tan oil bottle. "Now run and play, pussy.
Mommy's going up to the hotel and have a Martini with Mrs. Hubbel. I'll bring you the olive."


Set loose, Sybil immediately ran down to the flat part of the beach and began to walk in the direction of Fisherman's
Pavilion. Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle, she was soon out of the area reserved for guests of the
hotel.
She walked for about a quarter of a mile and then suddenly broke into an oblique run up the soft part of the beach. She
stopped short when she reached the place where a young man was lying on his back.
"Are you going in the water, see more glass?" she said.
The young man started, his right hand going to the lapels of his terry-cloth robe. He turned over on his stomach, letting
a sausaged towel fall away from his eyes, and squinted up at Sybil.
"Hey. Hello, Sybil."
"Are you going in the water?"
"I was waiting for you," said the young man. "What's new?"
"What?" said Sybil.
"What's new? What's on the program?"
"My daddy's coming tomorrow on a nairiplane," Sybil said, kicking sand.
"Not in my face, baby," the young man said, putting his hand on Sybil's ankle. "Well, it's about time he got here, your
daddy. I've been expecting him hourly. Hourly."
"Where's the lady?" Sybil said.
"The lady?" the young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. "That's hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a
thousand places. At the hairdresser's. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room." Lying
prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. "Ask me something else,
Sybil," he said. "That's a fine bathing suit you have on. If there's one thing I like, it's a blue bathing suit."
Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. "This is a yellow," she said. "This is a yellow."
"It is? Come a little closer." Sybil took a step forward. "You're absolutely right. What a fool I am."
"Are you going in the water?" Sybil said.
"I'm seriously considering it. I'm giving it plenty of thought, Sybil, you'll be glad to know."
Sybil prodded the rubber float that the young man sometimes used as a head-rest. "It needs air," she said.
"You're right. It needs more air than I'm willing to admit." He took away his fists and let his chin rest on the sand.
"Sybil," he said, "you're looking fine. It's good to see you. Tell me about yourself." He reached in front of him and took
both of Sybil's ankles in his hands. "I'm Capricorn," he said. "What are you?"
"Sharon Lipschutz said you let her sit on the piano seat with you," Sybil said.


"Sharon Lipschutz said that?"
Sybil nodded vigorously.
He let go of her ankles, drew in his hands, and laid the side of his face on his right forearm. "Well," he said, "you know
how those things happen, Sybil. I was sitting there, playing. And you were nowhere in sight. And Sharon Lipschutz came
over and sat down next to me. I couldn't push her off, could I?"
"Yes."
"Oh, no. No. I couldn't do that," said the young man. "I'll tell you what I did do, though."
"What?"
"I pretended she was you."
Sybil immediately stooped and began to dig in the sand. "Let's go in the water," she said.
"All right," said the young man. "I think I can work it in."
"Next time, push her off," Sybil said. "Push who off?"
"Sharon Lipschutz."
"Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire." He suddenly got
to his feet. He looked at the ocean. "Sybil," he said, "I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll see if we can catch a bananafish."
"A what?"
"A bananafish," he said, and undid the belt of his robe. He took off the robe. His shoulders were white and narrow, and
his trunks were royal blue. He folded the robe, first lengthwise, then in thirds. He unrolled the towel he had used over
his eyes, spread it out on the sand, and then laid the folded robe on top of it. He bent over, picked up the float, and
secured it under his right arm. Then, with his left hand, he took Sybil's hand.
The two started to walk down to the ocean.
"I imagine you've seen quite a few bananafish in your day," the young man said.
Sybil shook her head.
"You haven't? Where do you live, anyway?"
"I don't know," said Sybil.
"Sure you know. You must know. Sharon Lipschutz knows where she lives and she's only three and a half."
Sybil stopped walking and yanked her hand away from him. She picked up an ordinary beach shell and looked at it with
elaborate interest. She threw it down. "Whirly Wood, Connecticut," she said, and resumed walking, stomach foremost.
"Whirly Wood, Connecticut," said the young man. "Is that anywhere near Whirly Wood, Connecticut, by any chance?"


Sybil looked at him. "That's where I live," she said impatiently. "I live in Whirly Wood, Connecticut." She ran a few steps
ahead of him, caught up her left foot in her left hand, and hopped two or three times.
"You have no idea how clear that makes everything," the young man said.
Sybil released her foot. "Did you read `Little Black Sambo'?" she said.
"It's very funny you ask me that," he said. "It so happens I just finished reading it last night." He reached down and took
back Sybil's hand. "What did you think of it?" he asked her.
"Did the tigers run all around that tree?"
"I thought they'd never stop. I never saw so many tigers."
"There were only six," Sybil said.
"Only six!" said the young man. "Do you call that only?"
"Do you like wax?" Sybil asked.
"Do I like what?" asked the young man. "Wax."
"Very much. Don't you?"
Sybil nodded. "Do you like olives?" she asked.
"Olives--yes. Olives and wax. I never go anyplace without 'em."
"Do you like Sharon Lipschutz?" Sybil asked.
"Yes. Yes, I do," said the young man. "What I like particularly about her is that she never does anything mean to little
dogs in the lobby of the hotel. That little toy bull that belongs to that lady from Canada, for instance. You probably
won't believe this, but some little girls like to poke that little dog with balloon sticks. Sharon doesn't. She's never mean or
unkind. That's why I like her so much."
Sybil was silent.
"I like to chew candles," she said finally.
"Who doesn't?" said the young man, getting his feet wet. "Wow! It's cold." He dropped the rubber float on its back.
"No, wait just a second, Sybil. Wait'll we get out a little bit."
They waded out till the water was up to Sybil's waist. Then the young man picked her up and laid her down on her
stomach on the float.
"Don't you ever wear a bathing cap or anything?" he asked.
"Don't let go," Sybil ordered. "You hold me, now."


"Miss Carpenter. Please. I know my business," the young man said. "You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish.
This is a perfect day for bananafish."
"I don't see any," Sybil said.
"That's understandable. Their habits are very peculiar." He kept pushing the float. The water was not quite up to his
chest. "They lead a very tragic life," he said. "You know what they do, Sybil?"
She shook her head.
"Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But
once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as
seventy-eight bananas." He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon. "Naturally, after that they're so
fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door."
"Not too far out," Sybil said. "What happens to them?"
"What happens to who?"
"The bananafish."
"Oh, you mean after they eat so many bananas they can't get out of the banana hole?"
"Yes," said Sybil.
"Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die."
"Why?" asked Sybil.
"Well, they get banana fever. It's a terrible disease."
"Here comes a wave," Sybil said nervously.
"We'll ignore it. We'll snub it," said the young man. "Two snobs." He took Sybil's ankles in his hands and pressed down
and forward. The float nosed over the top of the wave. The water soaked Sybil's blond hair, but her scream was full of
pleasure.
With her hand, when the float was level again, she wiped away a flat, wet band of hair from her eyes, and reported, "I
just saw one."
"Saw what, my love?"
"A bananafish."
"My God, no!" said the young man. "Did he have any bananas in his mouth?"
"Yes," said Sybil. "Six."
The young man suddenly picked up one of Sybil's wet feet, which were drooping over the end of the float, and kissed
the arch.


"Hey!" said the owner of the foot, turning around.
"Hey, yourself We're going in now. You had enough?"
"No!"
"Sorry," he said, and pushed the float toward shore until Sybil got off it. He carried it the rest of the way.
"Goodbye," said Sybil, and ran without regret in the direction of the hotel.
The young man put on his robe, closed the lapels tight, and jammed his towel into his pocket. He picked up the slimy
wet, cumbersome float and put it under his arm. He plodded alone through the soft, hot sand toward the hotel.
On the sub-main floor of the hotel, which the management directed bathers to use, a woman with zinc salve on her nose
got into the elevator with the young man.
"I see you're looking at my feet," he said to her when the car was in motion.
"I beg your pardon?" said the woman.
"I said I see you're looking at my feet."
"I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor," said the woman, and faced the doors of the car.
"If you want to look at my feet, say so," said the young man. "But don't be a God-damned sneak about it."
"Let me out here, please," the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car.
The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back.
"I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them," said the
young man. "Five, please." He took his room key out of his robe pocket.
He got off at the fifth floor, walked down the hall, and let himself into 507. The room smelled of new calfskin luggage
and nail-lacquer remover.
He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it,
and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine,
looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed,
looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.



Once upon a Time
Nadine Gordimer

Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for children. I
reply that I don't write children's stories; and he writes back that at a recent
congress/book fair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least
one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don't accept that I
"ought" to write anything.
And then last night I woke upor rather was awakened without knowing what had
roused me.
A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious?
A sound.

A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along a
wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the creaking. I was waiting for
it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from room to room, coming up the passageto my door. I have
no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my
windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad
daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old widower and his collection of
antique clocks were strangled before he was knifed by a casual laborer he had dismissed without pay.
I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the dark. I lay quite stilla victim already
the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking this way and that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses
are, just out of rest, sleep! I could never listen intently as that in the distractions of the day, I was reading every faintest
sound, identifying and classifying its possible threat.

But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no human weight pressing on the boards, the
creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on
undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have
hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts
slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a
structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden
xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga1 migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at
that moment. The stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men
might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.
I couldn't find a position in which my mind would let go of my bodyrelease me to sleep again. So I began to tell
myself a story, a bedtime story.

In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other very much and were living happily
ever after. They had a little boy, and they loved him very much. They had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very
much. They had a car and a caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming-pool which was fenced so that the little boy and
his playmates would not fall in and drown. They had a housemaid who was absolutely trustworthy and an itinerant
gardener who was highly recommended by the neighbors. For when they began to live happily ever after they were
warned, by that wise old witch, the husband's mother, not to take on anyone off the street. They were inscribed in a
medical benefit society, their pet dog was licensed, they were insured against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed
to the local Neighborhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN
WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or white, and
therefore proved the property owner was no racist.

It was not possible to insure the house, the swimming pool or the car against riot damage. There were riots, but these
were outside the city, where people of another color were quartered. These people were not allowed into the suburb
except as reliable housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet she was afraid
that some day such people might come up the street and tear off the plaque YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and open


the gates and stream in... Nonsense, my dear, said the husband, there are police and soldiers and tear-gas and guns to
keep them away. But to please herfor he loved her very much and buses were being burned, cars stoned, and
schoolchildren shot by the police in those quarters out of sight and hearing of the suburbhe had electronically
controlled gates fitted. Anyone who pulled off the sign YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and tried to open the gates
would have to announce his intentions by pressing a button and speaking into a receiver relayed to the house. The little
boy was fascinated by the device and used it as a walkie-talkie in cops and robbers play with his small friends.

1 Chopi and Tsonga: two peoples from Mozambique, northeast of South Africa

The riots were suppressed, but there were many burglaries in the suburb and somebody's trusted housemaid was tied up
and shut in a cupboard by thieves while she was in charge of her employers' house. The trusted housemaid of the man
and wife and little boy was so upset by this misfortune befalling a friend left, as she herself often was, with responsibility
for the possessions of the man and his wife and the little boy that she implored her employers to have burglar bars
attached to the doors and windows of the house, and an alarm system installed. The wife said, She is right, let us take
heed of her advice. So from every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now saw
the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boy's pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in
his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house.

The alarm was often answeredit seemedby other burglar alarms, in other houses, that had been triggered by pet cats
or nibbling mice. The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon
became accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the suburb no more than the croak of frogs and musical
grating of cicadas' legs. Under cover of the electronic harpies' discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into
homes, taking away hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and
sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whiskey in
the cabinets or patio bars. Insurance companies paid no compensation for single malt2, a loss made keener by the
property owner's knowledge that the thieves wouldn't even have been able to appreciate what it was they were drinking.

Then the time came when many of the people who were not trusted housemaids and gardeners hung about the suburb
because they were unemployed. Some importuned for a job: weeding or painting a roof; anything, baas3, madam. But
the man and his wife remembered the warning about taking on anyone off the street. Some drank liquor and fouled the
street with discarded bottles. Some begged, waiting for the man or his wife to drive the car out of the electronically
operated gates. They sat about with their feet in the gutters, under the jacaranda trees that made a green tunnel of the
streetfor it was a beautiful suburb, spoilt only by their presenceand sometimes they fell asleep lying right before the
gates in the midday sun. The wife could never see anyone go hungry. She sent the trusted housemaid out with bread and
tea, but the trusted housemaid said these were loafers and tsotsis4, who would come and tie her and shut her in a
cupboard. The husband said, She's right. Take heed of her advice. You only encourage them with your bread and tea.
They are looking for their chance . .. And he brought the little boy's tricycle from the garden into the house every night,
because if the house was surely secure, once locked and with the alarm set, someone might still be able to climb over the
wall or the electronically closed gates into the garden.

You are right, said the wife, then the wall should be higher. And the wise old witch, the husband's mother, paid for the
extra bricks as her Christmas present to her son and his wifethe little boy got a Space Man outfit and a book of fairy
tales.
But every week there were more reports of intrusion: in broad daylight and the dead of night, in the early hours of the
morning, and even in the lovely summer twilighta certain family was at dinner while the bedrooms were being
ransacked upstairs. The man and his wife, talking of the latest armed robbery in the suburb, were distracted by the sight
of the little boy's pet cat effortlessly arriving over the seven-foot wall, descending first with a rapid bracing of extended
forepaws down on the sheer vertical surface, and then a graceful launch, landing with swishing tail within the property.
The whitewashed wall was marked with the cat's comings and goings; and on the street side of the wall there were larger
red-earth smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen on the feet of unemployed
loiterers, that had no innocent destination.

When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the neighborhood streets they no longer
paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of
security fences, walls and devices. The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a remarkable choice: there was the low-cost


option of pieces of broken glass embedded in cement along the top of walls, there were iron grilles ending in lance-
points, there were attempts at reconciling the aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spanish Villa style (spikes painted
pink) and with the plaster urns of neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned like zigzags of lightning and painted
pure white). Some walls had a small board affixed, giving the name and telephone number of the firm responsible for
the installation of the devices. While the little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife found themselves
comparing the possible effectiveness of each style against its appearance; and after several weeks when they paused
before this barricade or that without needing to speak, both came out with the conclusion that only one was worth
considering.

It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident
efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades,
so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs.
There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of
flesh. The wife shuddered to look at it. You're right, said the husband, anyone would think twice... And they took heed
of the advice on a small board fixed to the wall: Consult DRAGON'S TEETH The People For Total Security.
Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house where the
husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were living happily ever after. The sunlight flashed and slashed, off
the serrations, the cornice of razor thorns encircled the home, shining. The husband said, Never mind. It will weather.
The wife said, You're wrong. They guarantee it's rust-proof. And she waited until the little boy had run off to play before
she said, I hope the cat will take heed . . . The husband said, Don't worry, my dear, cats always look before they leap.
And it was true that from that day on the cat slept in the little boy's bed and kept to the garden, never risking a try at
breaching security.

One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book the wise old witch had given him at
Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss
the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his
little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and
struggled deeper into its tangle. The trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener, whose "day" it was, came running, the
first to see and to scream with him, and the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to get at the little boy. Then the man
and his wife burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the
screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers,
and they carried itthe man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardenerinto the house.

ONCE UPON A TIME First published in 1989. Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in a small town near
Johannesburg, South Africa, and graduated from the University of Witwatersrand. She has taught at several American
universities, but continues to reside in her native country. A prolific writer, Gordimer has published more than twenty
books of fiction (novels and short story collections). In addition to England's prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction, she
received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991.

__________________________________________________
1 Chopi and Tsonga: two peoples from Mozambique, northeast of South Africa
2 Single malt: an expensive Scotch whiskey
3 baas: boss
4 tsotsis: hooligans


Once upon a Time

QUESTIONS

1. The opening section of the story is told by a writer awakened by a frightening sound in the night. What two causes
for the sound does she consider? Ultimately, which is the more significant cause for fear? How do these together
create an emotional background for the "children's story" she tells?

2. What stylistic devices create the atmosphere of children's stories? How is this atmosphere related to the story's
theme?

3. To what extent does the story explore the motives for the behavior of the wife and husband, the husband's mother,
the servants, and the people who surround the suburb and the house? What motives can you infer for these people?
What ironies do they display in their actions?

4. Can you fix the blame for the calamity that befalls the child? What are the possible meanings of the repeated phrase
"YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED"?

5. What details in the introductory section and in the children's story imply the nature of the social order in which
both occur?

6. Analyze the story's final paragraph in detail. How does it help to elucidate the theme?


Eveline
James Joyce

SHE sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned
against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was
tired.

Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his
footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder
path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used
to play every evening with other people's children. Then a man from Belfast bought the
field and built houses in it -- not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with
shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field -- the Devines,
the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest,
however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of
the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out
when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her
father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she
and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had
gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many
years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from
which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the
priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the
promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the
photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

"He is in Melbourne now."

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her
home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. O course she had to
work hard, both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she
had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan
would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.

"Miss Hill, don't you see these ladies are waiting?"

"Look lively, Miss Hill, please."

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married -- she,
Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though
she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence. She knew it was that that had given
her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest,
because she was a girl but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead
mother's sake. And no she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating
business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday
nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages -- seven shillings -- and Harry always sent
up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that


she had no head, that he wasn't going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for
he was usually fairly bad on Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of
buying Sunday's dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather
purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of
provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to
hr charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work -- a hard life -- but now that she was
about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with
him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her. How
well she remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to
visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair
tumbled forward over a face of bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the Stores
every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an
unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were
courting and, when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. He used to call her
Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him.
He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out
to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the different services. He had sailed
through the Straits of Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos
Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her father had found out the affair
and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.

"I know these sailor chaps," he said.

One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover secretly.

The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other
was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she
noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he
had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all
gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mothers bonnet to make the children
laugh.

Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling
the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air Strange that
it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as
long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother's illness; she was again in the close dark room at the
other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and
given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:

"Damned Italians! coming over here!"

As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being -- that life of
commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother's voice saying constantly
with foolish insistence:

"Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!"

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life,
perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take
her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was
speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown


baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the
quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of
distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into the
mist. If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had
been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she
kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

"Come!"

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with
both hands at the iron railing.

"Come!"

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

"Eveline! Evvy!"

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set
her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.



A Rose for Emily
by
William Faulkner

I

WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral:
the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the
women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no
one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in
at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated
with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome
style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street.
But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the
august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the
gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had
gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in
the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of
Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of
hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when
Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro
woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her
father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to
the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this
way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman
could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some
little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They
wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her
himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin,
flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed,
without comment.

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through
which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted
by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a
close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the
Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint
dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before
the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.

They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing
into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was
why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long
submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small
pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their
errand.


She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt.
Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can
gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."

"But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?"

"I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--"

"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But, Miss Emily--"

"See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The
Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."

II

So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.

That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --
had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her
at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the
Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market basket.

"Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell
developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.

"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.

"Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "

"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the
yard. I'll speak to him about it."

The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do
something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That
night the Board of Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

"It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she
don't. .."

"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing
along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with
his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the
outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light
behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow
of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.


That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her
great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they
really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as
a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his
back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be
thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have
turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they
could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old
thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss
Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was
not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let
them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father
quickly.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had
driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

III

SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a
vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the
work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a
Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to
hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in
town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the
group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the
matched team of bays from the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would
not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief
could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her
kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the
estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not
even been represented at the funeral.

And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to
one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind
jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor
Emily."

She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever
the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her
imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say
"Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her.

"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual,
with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as
you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said.


"Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom--"

"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."

The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--"

"Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?"

"Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--"

"I want arsenic."

The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the
druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."

Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and
got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back.
When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."

IV

So THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun
to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because
Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club--
that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in
the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins
and whip in a yellow glove.

Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men
did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call
upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next
Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in
Alabama.

So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we
were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet
set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of
men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad because the
two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.

So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a
little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss
Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss
Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected
all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen
door at dusk one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with
the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as
the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then
we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many
times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer


and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at
seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty,
during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the
daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the
same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile
her taxes had been remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell
away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies'
magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal
delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She
would not listen to them.

Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket.
Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and
then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the
carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from
generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We
did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro

He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow
and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

V

THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their
quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen
again.

The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss
Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the
ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the
lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and
courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a
diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the
narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which
would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb
seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose
color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things
backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if
they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit,
carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.


For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once
lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had
cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the
bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning
forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.


The Swimmer
John Cheever
THE SWIMMER First published in 1964. John Cheever (19121982) was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. After being
expelled from a private school at seventeen, he went to New York City and published his first story later that year. He
lived in various New England and New York towns, especially in commuter towns near New York City.

It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits
around saying " I drank too much last night. You might have heard it
whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of
the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it
from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife
preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a
terrible hangover. " I drank too much,
"
said Donald Westerhazy. "We
all drank too much,
"
said Lucinda Merrill.
"
It must have been the wine,
"

said Helen Westerhazy. "I drank too much of that claret.
"

'This was at the edge of the Westerhazy
'
s pool. The pool, fed by an
artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale shade of green. It was a
fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of cumulus clouds so
like a city seen from a distance from the bow of an approaching ship
that it might have had a name. Lisbon. Hackensack. The sun was hot.
Neddy Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a
glass of gin. He was a slender manhe seemed to have the especial
slenderness of youth and while he was far from young he had slid
down his banister that morning and given the bronze backside of
Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of
coffee in his dining room. He might have been compared to a
summer
'
s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a
tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth,
sport, and clement weather. He had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply, stertorously as if he could gulp
into his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure. It all seemed to flow
into his chest. His own house stood in Bullet Park, eight miles to the south, where his four beautiful daughters would
have had their lunch and might be playing tennis. "Then it occurred to him that by taking a dogleg to the southwest he
could reach his home by water.
His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of
escape. He seemed to see, with a cartographer
'
s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that
curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream
Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague
and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might
enlarge and celebrate its beauty.
He took off a sweater that was hung over his shoulders and dove in. He had an inexplicable contempt for men who
did not hurl themselves into pools. He swam a choppy crawl, breathing either with every stroke or every fourth stroke
and counting somewhere well in the back of his mind the one-two one-two of a flutter kick. It was not a serviceable
stroke for long distances but the domestication of swimming had saddled the sport with some customs and in his part of
the world a crawl was customary. To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed,
than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible,
considering his project. He hoisted him-self up on the far curb he never used the ladderand started across the lawn.
When Lucinda asked where he was going he said he was going to swim home.
The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough. First there
were the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the Crosscups. He would cross Ditmar Street to the
Bunkers and come, after a short portage, to the Levys, the Welchers, and the public pool in Lancaster. Then there were


the Hallorans, the Sachses, the Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins, and the Clydes. The day was lovely, and that
he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence. His heart was high and he
ran across the grass. Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an
explorer, a man with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along the way; friends would line the banks of
the Lucinda River.
He went through a hedge that separated the Westerhazys' land from the Grahams', walked under some flowering
apple trees, passed the shed that housed their pump and filter, and came out at the Grahams' pool. "Why, Neddy," Mrs.
Graham said, "what a marvelous surprise. I've been trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here, let me get you a
drink." He saw then, like any explorer, that the hospitable customs and traditions of the natives would have to be
handled with diplomacy if he was ever going to reach his destination. He did not want to mystify or seem rude to the
Grahams nor did he have the time to linger there. He swam the length of their pool and joined them in the sun and was
rescued, a few minutes later, by the arrival of two carloads of friends from Connecticut. During the uproarious reunions
he was able to slip away. He went down by the front of the Grahams' house, stepped over a thorny hedge, and crossed a
vacant lot to the Hammers'. Mrs. Hammer, looking up from her roses, saw him swim by although she wasn't quite sure
who it was. The Lears heard him splashing past the open windows of their living room. The Howlands and the Cross-
cups were away. After leaving the Howlands' he crossed Ditmar Street and started for the Bunkers', where he could hear,
even at that distance, the noise of a party.
The water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and seemed to suspend it in midair. The Bunkers' pool was on
a rise and he climbed some stairs to a terrace where twenty-five or thirty men and women were drinking. The only
person in the water was Rusty Towers, who floated there on a rubber raft. Oh, how bonny and lush were the banks of
the Lucinda River! Prosperous men and women gathered by the sapphire-colored waters while caterer's men in white
coats passed them cold gin. Overhead a red de Haviland trainer was circling around and around and around in the sky
with something like the glee of a child in a swing. Ned felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for the
gathering, as if it was something he might touch. In the distance he heard thunder. As soon as Enid Bunker saw him she
began to scream: "Oh, look who's here! What a marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn't come I thought
I'd die." She made her way to him through the crowd, and when they had finished kissing she led him to the bar, a
progress that was slowed by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the hands of as many
men. A smiling bartender he had seen at a hundred parties gave him a gin and tonic and he stood by the bar for a
moment, anxious not to get stuck in any conversation that would delay his voyage. When he seemed about to be
surrounded he dove in and swam close to the side to avoid colliding with Rusty's raft. At the far end of the pool he
bypassed the Tomlinsons with a broad smile and jogged up the garden path. The gravel cut his feet but this was the only
unpleasantness. The party was confined to the pool, and as he went toward the house he heard the brilliant, watery
sound of voices fade, heard the noise of a radio from the Bunkers' kitchen, where someone was listening to a hall game.
Sunday afternoon. He made his way through the parked cars and down the grassy border of their driveway to Alewives
Lane. He did not want to be seen on the road in his bathing trunks but there was no traffic and he made the short
distance to the Levys' driveway, marked with a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign and a green tube for The New York Times.
All the doors and windows of the big house were open but there were no signs of life; not even a dog barked. He went
around the side of the house to the pool and saw that the Levys had only recently left. Glasses and bottles and dishes of
nuts were on a table at the deep end, where there was a bathhouse or gazebo, hung with Japanese lanterns. After
swimming the pool he got himself a glass and poured a drink. It was his fourth or fifth drink and he had swum nearly
half the length of the Lucinda River. He felt tired, clean, and pleased at that moment to be alone; pleased with
everything.
It would storm. The stand of cumulus cloud that cityhad risen and darkened, and while he sat there he heard
the percussiveness of thunder again. The do Haviland trainer was still circling overhead and it seemed to Ned that he
could almost hear the pilot laugh with pleasure in the afternoon; but when there was another peal of thunder he took off
for home. A train whistle blew and he wondered what time it had gotten to be. Four? Five? He thought of the provincial
station at that hour, where a waiter, his tuxedo concealed by a raincoat, a dwarf with some flowers wrapped in
newspaper, and a woman who had been crying would be waiting for the local. It was suddenly growing dark; it was that
moment when the pinheaded birds seem to organize their song into some acute and knowledgeable recognition of the
storm's approach. Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there
had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what
was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stairs, why had the
simple task of shutting the windows of an old house seemed fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm
wind have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings? Then there was an explosion, a smell of
cordite, and rain lashed the Japanese lanterns that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last, or was it the year


before that?
He stayed in the Levys' gazebo until the storm had passed. The rain had cooled the air and he shivered. The force of
the wind had stripped a maple of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and the water. Since it was
midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn. He braced his shoulders,
emptied his glass, and started for the Welchers' pool. This meant crossing the Lindlevs' riding ring and he was surprised
to find it overgrown with grass and all the jumps dismantled. He wondered if the Lindleys had sold their horses or gone
away for the summer and put them out to board. He seemed to remember having heard something about the Lindleys
and their horses but the memory was unclear. On he went, barefoot through the wet grass, to the Welchers', where he
found their pool was dry.
This breach in his chain of water disappointed him absurdly, and he felt lo like some explorer who seeks a torrential
headwater and finds a dead stream. He was disappointed and mystified. It was common enough to go away for the
summer but no one ever drained his pool. The Welchers had definitely gone away. The pool furniture was fielded,
stacked, and covered with a tarpaulin. The bathhouse was locked. All the windows of the house were shut, and when he
went around to the driveway in front he saw a FOR SALE sign nailed to a tree. When had he last heard from the
Welchers when, that is, had he and Lucinda last regretted an invitation to dine with them? It seemed only a week or so
ago. Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his
sense of the truth? Then in the distance he heard the sound of a tennis game. This cheered him, cleared away all his
apprehensions and let him regard the overcast sky and the cold air with indifference. This was the day that Neddy Merrill
swam across the county_ .That was the day! He started off then for his most difficult portage.
I lad you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the
shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had
his car broken down, or was he merely a fool. Standing barefoot in the deposits of the highway beer cans, rags, and
blowout patches exposed to all kinds of ridicule, he seemed pitiful. He had known when he started that this was a part of
his journey it had been on his maps but confronted with the lines of traffic, worming through the summery light, he
found him-self unprepared. I le was laughed at, jeered at, a beer can was thrown at him, and he had no dignity or humor
to bring to the situation. He could have gone back, back to the Westerhazys', where Lucinda would still be sitting in the
sun. He had signed nothing, vowed nothing, pledged nothing, not even to himself. Why, believing as he did, that all
human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was he unable to turn hack? Why was he determined to complete
his journey even if it meant putting his life in danger? At what point had this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay
become serious? He could not go back, he could not even recall with any clearness the green water at the Westerhazys',
the sense of inhaling the day's components, the friendly and relaxed voices saying that they had drunk too much. In the
space of an hour, more or less, he had covered a distance that made his return impossible.
An old man, tooling down the highway at fifteen miles an hour, let him get to the middle of the road, where there
was a grass divider. Here he was exposed to the ridicule of the northbound traffic, but after ten or fifteen minutes he
was able to cross. From here he had only a short walk to the Recreation Center at the edge of the village of Lancaster,
where there were some handball courts and a public pool.
The effect of the water on voices, the illusion of brilliance and suspense, was the same here as it had been at the
Bunkers' but the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill, and as soon as he entered the crowded enclosure he
was confronted with regimentation. "ALL SWIMMERS MUST TAKE A SHOWER BEFORE USING THE POOL.
ALL SWIMMERS MUST USE THE FOOTBATH. ALL SWIMMERS MUST WEAR THEIR IDENTIFICATION
DISKS."
He took a shower, washed his feet in a cloudy and bitter solution, and made his way to the edge of the water. It stank
of chlorine and looked to him like a sink. A pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers blew police whistles at what seemed to
be regular intervals and abused the swimmers through a public address system. Neddy remembered the sapphire water at
the Bunkers' with longing and thought that he might contaminate himself damage his own prosperousness and charm by
swimming in this murk, but he reminded himself that he was an explorer, a pilgrim, and that this was merely a stagnant
bend in the Lucinda River. He dove, scowling with distaste, into the chlorine and had to swim with his head above water
to avoid collisions, but even so he was bumped into, splashed, and jostled. When he got to the shallow end both
lifeguards were shouting at him: "Hey, you, you without the identification disk, get outa the water." He did, but they had
no way of pursuing him and he went through the reek of suntan oil and chlorine out through the hurricane fence and
passed the handball courts. By crossing the road he entered the wooded part of the Halloran estate. The woods were not
cleared and the footing was treacherous and difficult until he reached the lawn and the clipped beech hedge that
encircled their pool.
The Hallorans were friends, an elderly couple of enormous wealth who seemed to bask in the suspicion that they
might be Communists. They were zealous reformers but they were not Communists, and yet when they were accused, as


they sometimes were, of subversion, it seemed to gratify and excite them. Their beech hedge was yellow and he guessed
this had been blighted like the Levys' maple. I is called hullo, hullo, to warn the Hallorans of his approach, to palliate his
invasion of their privacy. The Hallorans, for reasons that had never been explained to him, did not wear bathing suits.
No explanations were in order, really. Their nakedness was a detail in their uncompromising zeal for reform and he
stepped politely out of his trunks before he went through the opening in the hedge.
Mrs. Halloran, a stout woman with white hair and a serene face, was reading the limes. Mr. Halloran was taking
beech leaves out of the water with a scoop. They seemed not surprised or displeased to sec him. Their pool was perhaps
the oldest in the county, a fieldstone rectangle, fed by a brook. It had no filter or pump and its waters were the opaque
gold of the stream.
"I'm swimming across the county," Ned said.
"Why, I didn't know one could," exclaimed Mrs. Halloran.
"Well, I've made it from the Westerhazys'," Ned said. "That must be about four miles."
He left his trunks at the deep end, walked to the shallow end, and swam this stretch. As he was pulling himself out of
the water he heard Mrs. Halloran say, "We've been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy."
"My misfortunes?" Ned asked. "I don't know what you mean."
"Why, we heard that you'd sold the house and that your poor children .. . "I don't recall having sold the house," Ned
said, "and the girls are at home."
"Yes," Mrs. Halloran sighed. "Yes ..." Her voice filled the air with an unseasonable melancholy and Ned spoke
briskly. "Thank you for the swim."
"Well, have a nice trip," said Mrs. Halloran.
Beyond the hedge he pulled on his trunks and fastened them. They were loose and he wondered if, during the space
of an afternoon, he could have lost some weight. He was cold and he was tired and the naked Hallorans and their dark
water had depressed him. The swim was too much for his strength but how could he have guessed this, sliding down the
banister that morning and sitting in the Westerhazys' sun? His arms were lame. His legs felt rubbery and ached at the
joints. The worst of it was the cold in his bones and the feeling that he might never be warm again. Leaves were falling
down around him and he smelled wood smoke on the wind. Who would be burning wood at this time of year?
He needed a drink. Whiskey would warm him, pick him up, carry him through the last of his journey, refresh his
feeling that it was original and valorous to swim across the county. Channel swimmers took brandy. He needed a
stimulant. He crossed the lawn in front of the Hallorans' house and went down a little path to where they had built a
house for their only daughter, Helen, and her husband, Eric Sachs. The Sachses' pool was small and he found Helen and
her husband there.
"Oh, Neddy," Helen said. "Did you lunch at Mother's?"
"Not really," Ned said. "I did stop to see your parents. This seemed to be explanation enough. "I'm terribly sorry to
break in on you like this but I've taken a chill and I wonder if you'd give me a drink."
"Why, I'd love to," Helen said, "but there hasn't been anything in this house to drink since Eric's operation. That
was three years ago."
Was he losing his memory, had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his
children were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill? His eyes slipped from Eric's face to his abdomen, where he saw
three pale, sutured scars, two of them at least a foot long. Gone was his navel, and what, Neddy thought, would the
roving hand, bed-checking one's gifts at 3 A.M., make of' a belly with no navel, no link to birth, this breach in the
succession?
"I'm sure you can get a drink at the Biswangers'," Helen said. "They're having an enormous do. You can hear it from
here. Listen!"
She raised her head and from across the road, the lawns, the gardens, the woods, the fields, he heard again the
brilliant noise of voices over water. "Well, I'll get wet," he said, still feeling that he had no freedom of choice about his
means of travel. He dove into the Sachses' cold water and, gasping, close to drowning, made his way from one end of
the pool to the other. "Lucinda and I want terribly to see you," he said over his shoulder, his face set toward the
Biswangers'. "We're sorry it's been so long and we'll call you very soon."
He crossed some fields to the Biswangers' and the sounds of revelry there. They would be honored to give him a
drink, they would be happy to give him a drink. The Biswangers invited him and Lucinda for dinner four times a year,
six weeks in advance. They were always rebuffed and yet they continued to send out their invitations, unwilling to
comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society. 'They were the sort of people who discussed the price
of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company. They
did not belong to Neddy's set - they were not even on Lucinda's Christmas card list. He went toward their pool with
feelings of indifference, charity, and some unease, since it seemed to be getting dark and these were the longest days of


the year. The party when he joined it was noisy and large. Grace Biswanger was the kind of hostess who asked the
optometrist, the veterinarian, the real-estate dealer, and the dentist. No one was swimming and the twilight, reflected on
the water of the pool, had a wintry gleam. There was a bar and he started for this. Then Grace Biswanger saw him she
came toward him, not affectionately as he had every right to expect, but bellicosely.
"Why, this party has everything," she said loudly, "including a gate crasher."
She could not deal him a social blow there was no question about this 35 and he did not flinch. "As a gate crasher,"
he asked politely, "do I rate a drink?"
"Suit yourself," she said. "You don't seem to pay much attention to invitations."
She turned her back on him and joined some guests, and he went to the bar and ordered a whiskey. The bartender
served him but he served him rudely. His was a world in which the caterer's men kept the social score, and to be
rebuffed by a part-time barkeep meant that he had suffered some loss of social esteem. Or perhaps the man was new
and uninformed. Then he heard Grace at his back say: "They went for broke overnight nothing but income --and he
showed up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five thousand dollars...." She was always talking about money. It
was worse than eating your peas off a knife. He dove into the pool, swam its length and went away.
The next pool on his list, the last but two, belonged to his old mistress, Shirley Adams. If he had suffered any injuries
at the Biswangers' they would be cured here. Love sexual roughhouse in fact --was the supreme elixir, the pain killer, the
brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step, the joy of life in his heart. They had had an affair last
week, last month, last year. He couldn't remember. It was he who had broken it off, his was the upper hand, and he
stepped through the gate of the wall that surrounded her pool with nothing so considered as self-confidence. It seemed
in a way to be his pool, as the lover, particularly the illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an authority
unknown to hole matrimony. She was there, her hair the color of brass, but her figure, at the edge of the lighted,
cerulean water, excited in him no profound memories. It had been, he thought, a lighthearted affair, although she had
wept when he broke it off. She seemed confused to see him and he wondered if she was still wounded. Would she, God
forbid, weep again?
"What do you want?" she asked.
"I'm swimming across the county."
"Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?"
"What's the matter?"
"If you've come here for money," she said, "I won't give you another cent."
"You could give me a drink."
"I could but I won't. I'm not alone."
"Well, I'm on my way."
He dove in and swam the pool, but when he tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his
arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder he saw, in the
lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds some stubborn
autumnal fragrance on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should
he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began
to cry.
It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried, certainly the first time in his life that he had ever
felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered. He could not understand the rudeness of the caterer's barkeep or the
rudeness of a mistress who had come to him on her knees and showered his trousers with tears. He had swum too long,
he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the water. What he needed then was a drink,
some company, and some clean, dry clothes, and while he could have cut directly across the road to his home he went
on to the Gilmartins' pool. Here, for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water
and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a youth. He staggered with fatigue on his way to the
Clydes' and paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and again with his hand on the curb to rest. He climbed up
the ladder and wondered if he had the strength to get home. He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but
he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague. Stooped, holding on to the gateposts for support,
he turned up the driveway of his own house.
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys' for supper?
Had the girls joined her there or gone someplace else? Hadn't they agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to regret all
their invitations and stay at home? He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust
came off the handles onto his hands. Going toward the house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked
one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning.
The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he


remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door,
tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw the place was empty.


The Drunkard
by Frank O'Connor

It was a terrible blow to Father when Mr. Dooley on the terrace died. Mr. Dooley was a
commercial traveller with two sons in the Dominicans and a car of his own, so socially he
was miles ahead of us, but he had no false pride. Mr. Dooley was an intellectual, and, like all
intellectuals the thing he loved best was conversation, and in his own limited way Father was
a well-read man and could appreciate an intelligent talker. Mr. Dooley was remarkably
intelligent. Between business acquaintances and clerical contacts, there was very little he
didnt know about what went on in town, and evening after evening he crossed the road to
our gate to explain to Father the news behind the news. He had a low, palavering voice and a
knowing smile, and Father would listen in astonishment, giving him a conversational lead
now and again, and then stump triumphantly in to Mother with his face aglow and ask: Do
you know what Mr. Dooley is after telling me? Ever since, when somebody has given me
some bit of information off the record I have found myself on the point of asking: Was it
Mr. Dooley told you that?

Till I actually saw him laid out in his brown shroud with the rosary beads entwined between his waxy fingers I did not
take the report of his death seriously. Even then I felt there must be a catch and that some summer evening Mr. Dooley
must reappear at our gate to give us a lowdown on the next world. But Father was very upset, partly because Mr. Dooley
was about one age with himself, a thing that always gives a distinctly personal turn to another mans demise; partly
because now he would have no one to tell him what dirty work was behind the latest scene at the Corporation. You
could count on your fingers the number of men in Blarney Lane who read the papers as Mr. Dooley did, and none of
these would have overlooked the fact that Father was only a laboring man. Even Sullivan, the carpenter, a mere nobody,
thought he was a cut above Father. It was certainly a solemn event.

Half past two to the Curragh, Father said meditatively, putting down the paper.

But youre not thinking of going to the funeral? Mother asked in alarm.

Twould be expected, Father said, scenting opposition. I wouldnt give it to say to them.

I think, said Mother with suppressed emotion, it will be as much as anyone will expect if you go to the chapel with
him.

(Going to the chapel, of course, was one thing, because the body was removed after work, but going to the funeral
meant the loss of a half-days pay.)

The people hardly know us, she added.

God between us and all harm, Father replied with dignity, wed be glad if it was our own turn.

To give Father his due, he was always ready to lose a half day for the sake of an old neighbor. It wasnt so much that he
liked funerals as that he was a conscientious man who did as he would be done by; and nothing could have consoled him
so much for the prospect of his own death as the assurance of a worthy funeral. And, to give Mother her due, it wasnt
the half days pay she begrudged, badly as we could afford it.

Drink, you see, was Fathers great weakness. He could keep steady for months, even for years, at a stretch, and while he
did he was as good as gold. He was first up in the morning and brought the mother a cup of tea in bed, stayed at home
in the evenings and read the paper; saved money and bought himself a new blue serge suit and bowler hat. He laughed at
the folly of men who, week in week out, left their hard-earned money with the publicans; and sometimes, to pass an idle


hour, he took pencil and paper and calculated precisely how much he saved each week through being a teetotaller. Being
a natural optimist he sometimes continued this calculation through the whole span of his prospective existence and the
total was breathtaking. He would die worth hundreds.

If I had only known it, this was a bad sign; a sign he was becoming stuffed up with spiritual pride and imagining himself
better than his neighbors. Sooner or later, the spiritual pride grew till it called for some form of celebration. Then he
took a drinknot whisky, of course; nothing like thatjust a glass of some harmless drink like lager beer. That was the
end of Father. By the time he had taken the first he already realized he had made a fool of himself, took a second to
forget it and a third to forget that he couldnt forget, and at last came home reeling drunk. From this on it was The
Drunkards Progress, as in the moral prints. Next day he stayed in from work with a sick head while Mother went off to
make his excuses at the works, and inside a forthnight he was poor and savage and despondent again. Once he began he
drank steadily through everything down to the kitchen clock. Mother and I knew all the phases and dreaded all the
dangers. Funerals were one.

I have to go to Dunphys to do a half-days work, said Mother in distress. Whos to look after Larry?

Ill look after Larry, Father said graciously. The little walk will do him good.

There was no more to said, though we all knew I didnt need anyone to look after me, and that I could quite well have
stayed at home and looked after Sonny, but I was being attached to the party to act as a brake on Father. As a brake I
had never achieved anything, but Mother still had great faith in me.

Next day, when I got home from school, Father was there before me and made a cup of tea for both of us. He was very
good at tea, but too heavy in the hand for anything else; the way he cut bread was shocking. Afterwards, we went down
the hill to the church, Father wearing his best blue serge and a bowler cocked to one side of his head with the least
suggestion of the masher. To his great joy he discovered Peter Crowley among the mourners. Peter was another danger
signal, as I knew well from certain experiences after mass on Sunday morning: a mean man, as Mother said, who only
went to funerals for the free drinks he could get at them. It turned out that he hadnt even known Mr. Dooley! But
Father had a sort of contemptuous regard for him as one of the foolish people who wasted their good money in public-
houses when they could be saving it. Very little of his own money Peter Crowley wasted!

It was an excellent funeral from Fathers point of view. He had it all well studied before we set off after the hearse in the
afternoon sunlight.

Five carriages! he exclaimed. Five carriages and sixteen covered cars! Theres one alderman, two councillors and tis
known how many priests. I didnt see a funeral like this from the road since Willie Mack, the publican, died.

Ah, he was well liked, said Crowley in his dusky voice.

My goodness, dont I know that? snapped Father. Wasnt the man my best friend? Two nights before he diedonly
two nightshe was over telling me the goings-on about the housing contract. Them fellow in the Corporation are night
and day robbers. But even I never imagined he was as well connected as that.

Father was stepping out like a boy, pleased with everything: the other mourners, and the fine houses along Sundays
Well. I knew the danger signals were there in full force: a sunny day, a fine funeral, and a distinguished company of
clerics and public men were bringing out all the natural vanity and flightiness of Fathers character. It was with
something like genuine pleasure that he saw his old friend lowered into the grave; with the sense of having performed a
duty and a pleasant awareness that however much he would miss poor Mr. Dooley in the long summer evenings, it was
he and not poor Mr. Dooley who would do the missing.

Well be making tracks before they break up, he whispered to Crowley as the gravediggers tossed in the first shovelfuls
of clay, and away he went, hopping like a goat from grassy hump to hump. The drivers, who were probably in the same
state as himself, though without months of abstinence to put an edge to it, looked up hopefully.

Are they nearly finished, Mick, bawled one.


All over now bar the last prayers, trumpeted Father in the tone of one who brings news of great rejoicing.

The carriages passed us in a lather of dust several hundred yards from the public-house, and Father, whose feet gave him
trouble in hot weather, quickened his pace, looking nervously over his shoulder for any sign of the main body of
mourners crossing the hill. In a crowd like that a man might be kept waiting.

When we did reach the pub the carriages were drawn up outside, and solemn men in black ties were cautiously bringing
out consolation to mysterious females whose hands reached out modestly from behind the drawn blinds of the coaches.
Inside the pub there were only the drivers and a couple of shawly women. I felt if I was to act as a brake at all, this was
the time, so I pulled Father by the coattails.

Dadda, cant we go home now? I asked.

Two minutes now, he said, beaming affectionately. Just a bottle of lemonade and well go home.

This was a bribe, and I knew it, but I was always a child of weak character. Father ordered lemonade and two pints. I
was thirsty and swallowed my drink at once. But that wasnt Fathers way. He had long months of abstinence behind him
and an eternity of pleasure before. He took out his pipe, blew through it, filled it, and then lit it with loud pops, his eyes
bulging above it. After that he deliberately turned his back on the pint, leaned one elbow on the counter in the attitude
of a man who did not know there was a pint behind him, and deliberately brushed the tobacco from his palms. He had
settled down for the evening. He was steadily working through all the important funerals he had ever attended. The
carriages departed and the minor mourners drifted in till the pub was half full.

Dada, I said, pulling his coat again, cant we go home now?

Ah, your mother wont be in for a long time yet, he said benevolently enough. Run out in the road and play, can
you?

It struck me as very cool, the way grown-ups assumed that you could play all by yourself on a strange road. I began to
get bored as I had so often been bored before. I knew Father was quite capable of lingering there till nightfall. I knew I
might have to bring him home, blind drunk, down Blarney Lane, with all the old women at their doors, saying: Mick
Delaney is on it again. I knew that my mother would be half crazy with anxiety; that next day Father wouldnt go out to
work; and before the end of the week she would be running down to the pawn with the clock under her shawl. I could
never get over the lonesomeness of the kitchen without a clock.

I was still thirsty. I found if I stood on tiptoe I could just reach Fathers glass, and the idea occurred to me that it would
be interesting to know what the contents were like. He had his back to it and wouldnt notice. I took down the glass and
sipped cautiously. It was a terrible disappointment. I was astonished that he could even drink such stuff. It looked as if
he had never tried lemonade.

I should have advised him about lemonade but he was holding forth himself in great style. I heard him say that bands
were a great addition to a funeral. He put his arms in the position of someone holding a rifle in reverse and hummed a
few bars of Chopins Funeral March. Crowley nodded reverently. I took a longer drink and began to see that porter
might have its advantages. I felt pleasantly elevated and philosophic. Father hummed a few bars of the Dead March in
Saul. It was a nice pub and a very fine funeral, and I felt sure that poor Mr. Dooley in Heaven must be highly gratified.
At the same time I thought they might have given him a band. As Father said, bands were a great addition.

But the wonderful thing about porter was the way it made you stand aside, or rather float aloft like a cherub rolling on a
cloud, and watch yourself with your legs crossed, leaning against a bar counter, not worrying about trifles but thinking
deep, serious, grown-up thoughts about life and death. Looking at yourself like that, you couldnt help thinking after a
while how funny you looked, and suddenly you got embarrassed and wanted to giggle. But by the time I had finished the
pint, that phase too had passed; I found it hard to put back the glass, the counter seemed to have grown so high.
Melancholia was supervening again.


Well, Father said reverently, reaching behind him for his drink, God rest the poor mans soul, wherever he is! He
stopped, looked first at the glass, and then at the people round him. Hello, he said in a fairly good-humored tone, as if
he were just prepared to consider it a joke, even if it was in bad taste, who was at this?

There was silence for a moment while the publican and the old women looked first at Father and then at his glass.

There was no one at it, my good man, one of the women said with a offended air. Is it robbers you think we are?

Ah, theres no one here would do a thing like that, Mick, said the publican in a shocked tone.

Well, someone did it, said Father, his smile beginning to wear off.

If they did, they were them that were nearer it, said the woman darkly, giving me a dirty look; and at the same moment
the truth began to dawn on Father. I supposed I might have looked a bit starry-eyed. He bent and shook me.

Are you all right, Larry? he asked in alarm.

Peter Crowley looked down at me and grinned.

Could you beat that? he exclaimed in a husky voice.

I could, and without difficulty. I started to get sick. Father jumped back in holy terror that I might spoil his good suit,
and hastily opened the back door.

Run! run! run! he shouted.

I saw the sunlit wall outside with the ivy overhanging it, and ran. The intention was good but the performance was
exaggerated, because I lurched right into the wall, hurting it badly, as it seemed to me. Being always very polite, I said
Pardon before the second bout came on me. Father, still concerned for his suit, came up behind and cautiously held
me while I got sick.

Thats a good boy! he said encouragingly. Youll be grand when you get that up.

Begor, I was not grand! Grand was the last thing I was. I gave one unmerciful wail out of me as he steered me back to
the pub and put me sitting on the bench near the shawlies. They drew themselves up with an offended air, still sore at
the suggestion that they had drunk his pint.

God help us! moaned one, looking pityingly at me, isnt it the likes of them would be fathers?

Mick, said the publican in alarm, spraying sawdust on my tracks, that child isnt supposed to be in here at all. Youd
better take him home quick in case a bobby would see him.

Merciful God! whimpered Father, raising his eyes to heaven and clapping his hands silently as he only did when
distraught, What misfortune was on me? Or what will his mother say? If women might stop at home and look after
their children themselves! he added in a snarl for the benefit of the shawlies. Are them carriages all gone, Bill?

The carriages are finished long ago, Mick, replied the publican.

Ill take him home, Father said despairingly. Ill never bring you out again, he threatened me. Here, he added,
giving me the clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, put that over your eye.

The blood on the handkerchief was the first indication I got that I was cut, and instantly my temple began to throb and I
set up another howl.


Whisht, whisht, whisht! Father said testily, steering me out the door. Oned think you were killed. Thats nothing.
Well wash it when we get home.

Steady now, old scout! Crowley said, taking the other side of me. Youll be all right in a minute.

I never met two men who knew less about the effects of drink. The first breath of fresh air and the warmth of the sun
made me groggier than ever and I pitched and rolled between wind and tide till Father started to whimper again.

God Almighty, and the whole road out! What misfortune was on me didnt stop at my work! Cant you walk straight?

I couldnt. I saw plain enough that, coaxed by the sunlight, every woman old and young in Blarney Lane was leaning
over her half-door or sitting on her doorstep. They all stopped gabbling to gape at the strange spectacle of two sober,
middle-aged men bringing home a drunken small boy with a cut over his eye. Father, torn between the shamefast desire
to get me home as quick as he could, and the neighbourly need to explain that it wasnt his fault, finally halted outside
Mrs. Roches. There was a gang of old women outside a door at the opposite side of the road. I didnt like the look of
them from the first. They seemed altogether too interested in me. I leaned against the wall of Mrs. Roches cottage with
my hands in my trousers pockets, thinking mournfully of poor Mr. Dooley in his cold grave on the Curragh, who would
never walk down the road again, and, with great feeling, I began to sing a favorite song of Fathers.

Though lost to Mononia and cold in the grave
He returns to Kincora no more.

Wisha, the poor child! Mrs. Roche said. Havent he a lovely voice, God bless him!

That was what I thought myself, so I was the more surprised when Father said Whisht! and raised a threatening finger
at me. He didnt seem to realize the appropriateness of the song, so I sang louder than ever.

Whisht, I tell you! he snapped, and then tried to work up a smile for Mrs. Roches benefit. Were nearly home now.
Ill carry you the rest of the way.

But, drunk and all as I was, I knew better than to be carried home ignominiously like that.

Now, I said severely, cant you leave me alone? I can walk all right. Tis only my head. All I want is a rest.

But you can rest at home in bed, he said viciously, trying to pick me up, and I knew by the flush on his face that he
was very vexed.

Ah, Jasus, I said crossly, what do I want to go home for? Why the hell cant you leave me alone?

For some reason the gang of old women at the other side of the road thought this very funny. They nearly split their
sides over it. A gassy fury began to expand in me at the thought that a fellow couldnt have a drop taken without the
whole neighbourhood coming out to make game of him.

Who are ye laughing at? I shouted, clenching my fists at them. Ill make ye laugh at the other side of yeer faces if ye
dont let me pass.

They seemed to think this funnier still; I had never seen such ill-mannered people.

Go away, ye bloody bitches! I said.

Whisht, whisht, whisht, I tell you! snarled Father, abandoning all pretence of amusement and dragging me along
behind him by the hand. I was maddened by the womens shrieks of laughter. I was maddened by Fathers bullying. I
tried to dig in my heels but he was too powerful for me, and I could only see the women by looking back over my
shoulder.


Take care or Ill come back and show ye! I shouted. Ill teach ye to let decent people pass. Fitter for ye to stop at
home and wash yeer dirty faces.

Twill be all over the road, whimpered Father. Never again, never again, not if I lived to be a thousand!

To this day I dont know whether he was forswearing me or the drink. By way of a song suitable to my heroic mood I
bawled The Boys of Wexford, as he dragged me in home. Crowley, knowing he was not safe, made off and Father
undressed me and put me to bed. I couldnt sleep because of the whirling in my head. It was very unpleasant, and I got
sick again. Father came in with a wet cloth and mopped up after me. I lay in a fever, listening to him chopping sticks to
start a fire. After that I heard him lay the table.

Suddenly the front door banged open and Mother stormed in with Sonny in her arms, not her usual gentle, timid self,
but a wild, raging woman. It was clear that she had heard it all from the neighbours.

Mick Delaney, she cried hysterically, what did you do to my son?

Whisht, woman, whisht, whisht! he hissed, dancing from one foot to the other. Do you want the whole road to
hear?

Ah, she said with a horrifying laugh, the road knows all about it by this time. The road knows the way you filled your
unfortunate innocent child with drink to make sport for you and that other rotten, filthy brute.

But I gave him no drink, he shouted, aghast at the horrifying interpretation the neighbours had chosen to give his
misfortune. He took it while my back was turned. What the hell do you think I am?

Ah, she replied bitterly, everyone knows what you are now. God forgive you, wasting our hard-earned few hapence
on drink, and bringing up your child to be a drunken corner-boy like yourself.

Then she swept into the bedroom and threw herself on her knees by the bed. She moaned when she saw the gash over
my eye. In the kitchen Sonny set up a loud bawl on his own, and a moment later Father appeared in the bedroom door
with his cap over his eyes, wearing an expression of the most intense self-pity.

Thats a nice way to talk to me after all I went through, he whined. Thats a nice accusation that I was drinking. Not
one drop of drink crossed my lips the whole day. How could it when he drank it all? Im the one that ought to be pitied,
with my day ruined on me, and I after being made a show for the whole road.

But the next morning, when he got up and went out quietly to work with his dinner-basket, Mother threw herself at me
in the bed and kissed me. It seemed it was all my doing, and I was being given a holiday till my eye got better.

My brave little man! she said with her eyes shining. It was God did it you were there. You were his guardian angel.


A&P
by john updike

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot,
with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The
one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a
chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two
crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the
backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to
remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me
hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her
cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been
watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers
smoothed and her goodies into a bag --
she gives me a little snort in passing, if
she'd been born at the right time they
would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way
the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a
pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-
outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this
chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the
bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just
got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces,
the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and
one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls
think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so
much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking
around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen; she just walked straight on slowly, on
these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that
much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with
every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really
think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two
into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got
me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a
result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been
there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off,
there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of
her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim
face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head
so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her
neck was, the more of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn't
tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub
the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of


them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks-
crackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all
the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back.
The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way
signs or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind
of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off
dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and
muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they
do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after
pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.
You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look
at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those
stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.
"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."
"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I
can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.
"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's going to be manager
some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're right in
the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into
the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody,
including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can
see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-
seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're
north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they
shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting
his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it.
Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself. The store's
pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the
girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of.
After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or
Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, six-packs of candy bars, and plastic toys done
up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and
holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between
Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant
cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked myself) so the girls come to
me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour
Cream: 49. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the
money's coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled
pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is
about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's
pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this
isn't the beach."


Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close.
"My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see
the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of
a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-
cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and
they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody
over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons
stenciled on.
"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred
to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't
like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-
superintendent stare.
Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back -- a really sweet can --
pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing."
"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn't noticed she was
wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you come in here."
"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place
from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue
eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He turns his
back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all
bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could
feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this
purchase?"
I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT -- it's more
complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in
my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill,
tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known
were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and
hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear,
hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies
open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material
she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
"Did you say something, Sammy?"
"I said I quit."
"I thought you did."
"You didn't have to embarrass them."


"It was they who were embarrassing us."
I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grandmother's, and I know she would
have been pleased.
"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said.
"I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A
couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel siIGHS and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years. "Sammy,
you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a
gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the
counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of
your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so
scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer splats out. One advantage to
this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat
and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door
heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with
her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the
big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in
my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection
of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.


Bahnwrter Thiel
(Flagman Thiel)
By Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann
Translated by Wallace Johnson 1989
Chapter One
Every Sunday, signalman Thiel sat in the church in Neu-Zittau, except the days on
which he had duty, or was ill and was lying in bed. In the course of ten years, he
had only been ill twice: the first time was as a result of a piece of coal, which fell
the tender of a passing locomotive, and had struck him and had hurled him, with a
broken leg, into the ditch alongside the track; the other time was on account of a
wine bottle, which flew out of the express train speeding by on to the middle of his
chest. Apart from these two accidents, nothing was able to keep him away from
the church, so long as he was free.
For the first five years, he had to make his way from Schn-Schornstein, a hamlet
on the river Spree, over to Neu-Zittau alone. Then on one beautiful day, he
appeared in the company of a frail and ill-looking woman, who, as people said,
scarcely suited his herculean figure. And on one beautiful Sunday afternoon, he
ceremonially gave his hand to this very same person at the church altar in the life-
long bond of marriage. Then for two years, the young, sensitive woman sat at his
side in the church-pew; for two years, her hollow-cheeked, delicate face next to his,
browned by the weather, looked into the ancient hymn-book. Then suddenly, as
before, the signalman sat there alone.
On one of the previous weekdays, the Death-bell had sounded: that was her lot.
On the signalman, so the people assured, one had hardly perceived any changes.
The buttons of his clean Sunday-suit were made as shiny as before, and as always,
his red hair was well oiled and militarily parted; only that he carried his broad, hairy
neck a little lower and that he listened to the sermon more closely or sang more
eagerly, than he had previously done. It was a common view that the death of his
wife had not upset him considerably, and this view was enforced, when he, after the course of a year, was married for a
second time, to a big, strong woman, a dairymaid, from the Alte-Grund.
Also the parish-priest allowed himself to express his misgivings, when Thiel came to announce the wedding.
'So you want to marry again, already?'
'I cannot keep house with a dead woman, Father!'
'Now, of course. But I say, you are hurrying a little.'
'I shall lose my boy, Father.'
Thiel's wife had died in the weeks following child-birth, and the boy, which she had brought into the world, lived and
had taken the name of Tobias.
'Ah, the boy,' said the priest, and he made a gesture, which clearly showed that he had now, for the first time,
remembered the child.
'That is something else. Where have you been keeping him while you were on duty?'
Thiel now told of how he had given Tobias over to an old woman, who had once nearly allowed him to burn, while on
another occasion, he had rolled off her lap on to the floor, without, fortunately, suffering more than a large bump. So he
said that this could not go on any longer to the boy, who, weak as he was, needed a totally special kind of nursing. So,
because he had promised his dead wife to carry the substantial worry of the welfare of the boy at all times, he decided
upon this course of action.
The people definitely had nothing to object to concerning the new couple, who now came every Sunday to the church.
The earlier dairymaid seemed as she were made for the signalman. She was hardly half-a-head smaller than him, and she
surpassed him in the corpulence of limbs. Also, her face was made as coarsely as his; only that there was a difference
with his, in that her face lacked soul.
If Thiel had only wanted in his second wife to have an untiring worker and an exemplary house-keeper, then this wish
was surprisingly fulfilled. However, he had taken three things he did not know about in taking this wife: a hard,
Figure 2 - Gerhart Hauptmann


domineering nature, nagging and a brutal temper. After the course of half a year, it was made known in the hamlet, who
ruled the roost in the signalman's small house. One felt sorry for the signalman.
The outraged husbands said that it was lucky for 'the hussy' that she had such a good lamb as Thiel for a husband; if she
were to come up against some men, she would get terribly hurt. Such an 'animal' must be tamed, they said, and if things
do not go otherwise, then start with the beating. She ought to be thoroughly beaten, so that it really made her sore.
However, Thiel was not the man to give her a beating, despite his wiry arms. That, about which the people got excited,
seemed to cause him little worry. He usually let the endless lectures from his wife wash over him, without saying a word,
and if he were to answer back, the slow-tempo, as well as the soft, cool sound of his voice was in the most peculiar
contrast to the squeaking nagging of his wife. The outside world seemed to be able to affect him little; it was as if he
bore something in himself, in which all evil done to him was amply offset with good.
Despite his untiring apathy, there were moments, in which he did not stand for it. It was always so on the occasions
which concerned Tobias. Then, his childly-good, submissive nature gained a coat of strength, to which such a fierce
temper as that of Lene herself dared not oppose.
However the moments in which he turned out this side of his nature became, with time, more and more rare, and
eventually, became lost. A certain suffering resistance, which he had put up against the domineeringness of Lene during
the first year, lost itself as well in the second year. He did not go to work any more with the earlier indifference after he
had had row with her, if he had not calmed her down before. At the end, he nearly always condescended himself to ask
her to be nice to him again. - Not as before was his post in the middle of the Brandenburg pine-forest his most belovd
abode. The quiet, devoted thoughts of his dead wife were frustrated by those of his living wife. Not reluctantly, as at
first, did he make his way back home, after he had earlier counted the hours and minutes until quitting time, but with an
impassioned haste.
He, who had been bound with his first wife through a more spiritual love, driven by the power of natural urges into the
control of his second wife, became at the end, in almost all things, totally dependent on her. At times he felt guilty about
the reversal of things, and he required a number of extraordinary aids, in order to help himself get over this. So he
secretly declared the signalman's hut and the stretch of track, which he looked after, in a way, as sacred land, which was
said to be dedicated exclusively to the spirit of the dead woman. With the help of all kinds of excuses, he had been
successful, up to this time, in keeping his wife from accompanying him to the hut.
He hoped that he could continue to do this. She would not have known in which direction she ought to start out, in
order to find his hut, whose number she also did not know.
So Thiel calmed his thoughts in being able to split conscientiously, for himself, the available time between his living and
dead wives.
Often, admittedly, especially in his moments of solitary thought, if he had been intimately bound with his dead wife, he
saw his present situation in the light of truth, and he felt a revulsion for it.
When he had day duty, his spiritual contact with his dead wife was limited to a collection of belovd memories from the
time he had spent living with her. However, in the dark, when the snow storms blew through the pines and across the
track, in the deep middle of the night, by the light of his lantern, the signalman's hut became a chapel.
A faded photograph of the dead woman lay on the table before him, a hymn-book and a Bible lay open, he alternated
between reading and singing through the long night, only interrupted from doing these things at the times when the
trains rushed by; and as a result, this turned into an ecstacy, which heightened itself into visions, in which he saw the
dead woman personified before him.
But the post, which the signalman had held now, unbroken for ten years, had in its isolation, boosted his mysterious
inclination.
The hut stood at least three-quarters of an hour from every settlement in all of the four wind-directions and close by a
railway-crossing, whose barriers the signalman also had to operate.
In summer went days, in winter weeks, without a human foot, except those of the signalman and his colleague, passing
the stretch of track. The weather and the change of the times of the year brought, in their periodical recurrence, the only
changes to this solitude. The events, which, incidentally, had broken the regular running of Thiel's duty time, apart from
the two accidents, were easy to review. Four years ago, the Kaiser's special train had gone by, which the Kaiser himself
had taken to Breslau. On a winter night, the express train had run over a roebuck. On a hot summer's day, Thiel had
found, on his track-check, a corked wine bottle, which was scorching hot to the touch and whose contents were said by
him to have been rather good, because it had streamed out like a fountain, after removing the cork, and had obviously
fermented. This bottle, which was laid by Thiel in the shallow edge of the forest lake, in order to cool, had become lost
in some way or other, so that, after many years, he still had to feel sorry for their loss.


A spring, close behind the hut, provided several diversions for the signalman. From time to time, busy railway- and
telegraph-workers took a drink here, and naturally, a short conversation would result with him. Also, the forester came
here occasionally, in order to quench his thirst.
Tobias developed only slowly: not until the end of his second year of life, did he learn to just speak and to just walk. To
his father, he proved a totally special affection. As he became to understand more, the old love of his father was awoken
again. In the time as this grew, the love of his step-mother towards Tobias decreased, and was transformed in to an
unmistakable dislike, when Lene, after the course of another year, also gave birth to a boy.
From then on, a terrible time began for Tobias. He became, especially in the absence of his father, incessantly tormented
and he had to devote, without the smallest reward, his weak strength in the services of the small squalling baby, whereby
he became more and more worn out. His head grew to an unusual size; his fire-red hair and his chalky-white face, in
conjunction with his remaining wretched figure, made an unsightly, pitiable impression. In such a way, whenever the
backward Tobias dragged himself down to the Spree, with his little brother, the infant, bursting with health, on his arm,
then the curses from behind the windows of the cottage, which never found open expression, became loud. However,
Thiel, whom all these things concerned, seemed to have no eyes for them, and he also did not want to understand the
hints which were given to him by the well-meaning neighbouring people.
Chapter Two
On one June morning towards seven o'clock, Thiel arrived back from his duty. His wife had not so soon as finished her
greeting, when she began to complain in her usual manner. The lease on the field, which had, up to this time, provided
the family with its potato requirement, had been terminated weeks ago, and Lene had not yet succeeded in finding a
replacement. Even though the care of the field was part her responsibilities, Thiel had to hear about this once again, that
no-one, except he, would be to blame, if this year, they had to buy ten sacks of potatoes for a considerable sum of
money. Thiel only muttered and he took himself immediately off to the bed of his eldest son, which he shared with him
in the nights while he was on duty, paying little attention to Lene's speech. Here, he stooped and watched the sleeping
child with an anxious expression on his good face, whom he eventually woke, after he had, for a while, kept the
troublesome flies away from him. In the blue, deep-lying eyes of the awaking boy a touching peace reflected itself. He
hastily reached out for his father's hand, while he shaped the corner of his mouth into a pitiful smile. The signalman
helped him to get dressed into the small pieces of clothing, when something, like a shadow, suddenly ran through his
mind, as he noticed that on the right-hand, slightly-swollen side of the child's back, a few finger marks standing out,
white on red.
When Lene came back at breakfast, with increased enthusiasm concerning the aforementioned housekeeping matter,
Thiel cut her words with the news that the railway-inspector had let him have a piece of land along-side the railway-track
right next to the signalman's hut, for nothing, supposedly because it was too remote for him, the railway-inspector.
At first, Lene did not want to believe this. However, little by little, her doubts went away, and now she changed into a
noticeably good mood. Her questions about the size and quality of the field became really mixed up with others, and
when she found out that in addition at this place were two dwarf fruit-trees, she became totally crazy! When she had no-
more questions left to ask, and had mercilessly rung the door-bell of the grocer's shop, which, incidentally, could be
heard in every house in the hamlet, she rushed out, in order to spread the news in the small hamlet.
While Lene was in the grocer's dark room, packed with goods, the signalman occupied himself at home with Tobias. The
boy sat on his knee and played with a single pine-cone, which Thiel had brought out of the forest with him.
'What do you want to be?' his father asked him; and this question was as stereotypical as the boy's answer: 'A railway-
inspector.' There was no question, that with God's help, something extraordinary ought to come out of Tobias, for the
dreams of the signalman aspired in such heights, and he harboured the wish and the hope, in all seriousness. As soon as
the answer, 'a railway-inspector', came from the bloodless lips of the small boy, who naturally did not know what that
was to mean, Thiel's face began to lighten up, until it really shone with an inner bliss.
'Go Tobias, go and play!' he said abruptly, while he lit his pipe with a lighted spill from the cooking-stove, and the small
boy took himself directly out towards the door with a cautious joy. Thiel undressed and went to bed and fell asleep, after
he had stared, for some considerable time, full of thought, at the low, cracked ceiling. Towards twelve o'clock midday, he
woke up, dressed himself, and went outside into the street, while his wife was preparing lunch in her noisy manner,
where he immediately picked up little Tobias, who was scratching chalk out of a hole in the wall and putting it into his
mouth. The signalman took him by the hand and went with him past about eight houses in the hamlet, down to the
Spree, which lay black and glassy between sparsely leaved poplars. Near to the edge of the water was a block of granite,
on which Thiel sat down.
The entire hamlet was used to seeing him here in this place, if the weather was at all tolerable. The children especially,
hung around him and called him 'father Thiel' and were taught, in particular, a number of games, which he remembered
from his childhood. The best of his memories, however, he kept for Tobias. He cut for him a reed-dart, which flew


higher than all of those of the other boys. He cut for him a small willow-pipe and even allowed himself to be persuaded
to sing the magic formula, in his rusty bass voice, while he tapped the bark softly with the horn-handle of his pocket
knife.
The people were not at all pleased by his childish tricks; it seemed incomprehensible to them that he was able to spend
so much time with the snotty-nosed children. However, they allowed him to be content for the reason that the children
were well-looked after in his care. Moreover, Thiel also instructed them in more serious things: he went through the
older ones' school work, helped them to learn hymn and Bible verses and he spelt with the younger ones: F-R-O-M -
from; Y-O-U - you, and so on.
After lunch, the signalman laid himself down once more for a short rest. After it was over, he drank his afternoon coffee
and immediately began to prepare for going on duty. He need a lot of time to do all of his preparations; each movement
had been worked out for many years; the carefully laid out objects on the small, walnut chest-of-drawers were always put
into his clothes' pockets in the same sequence: knife, note-book, comb, a horse's tooth and the old, cased watch. A small
book, wrapped in red paper, was handled with special care. During the night, it had lain under the signalman's pillow and
was, during the day, always carried around in the breast pocket of his work clothes. On the label, under the wrapping, in
awkward, but ornamental, lettering, was written by Thiel's hand, 'Savings book of Tobias Thiel.'
The wall-clock with the long pendulum and the yellow face showed a quarter-to-five, when Thiel set off. A small
rowing-boat, his property, took him across the river. On the far bank of the Spree, he stood for a few moments and
listened back at the hamlet. Finally, he turned on to the broad forest path, and a few minutes later, he was in the middle
of the deep-rustling pine forest, whose pine-needles looked like a black-green, wavy sea. Inaudible, like on felt, he strode
across damp moss and layers of needles on the forest-floor. He found his way, without looking up, here through the
russet-coloured columns of the timber forest, then further on through the densely packed young wood, still further on
through the expanded forestry plantation, which was over-shadowed by single, tall, thin pine-trees, left for the protection
for the young trees. A bluish, transparent haze, impregnated with all kinds of smells, rose up from the ground and
seemed to wash away the forms of the trees. A heavy, milky sky hung low over the tree-tops. Swarms of crows bathed
themselves in the grey of the air, mercilessly expelling their screeching voices. Black pools of water filled the hollows of
the path and more gloomily mirrored the dull surroundings.
Terrible weather, thought Thiel, when he awoke from deep thought and looked up.
Suddenly, however, his thoughts took another direction. He vaguely felt that he had left something at home, and after
searching through his pockets, he was missing his sandwiches, which he was always obliged to take for halfway through
the long duty-time. Hesitantly, he stood there for a while, then suddenly, he turned around, and hurried back in the
direction of the village.
After a short-time, he had reached the Spree; he crossed over with a few powerful oar-strokes, and he straightaway
climbed up on to the gently rising village street, his whole body sweating. The grocer's old, shabby poodle lay in the
middle of the street. On the tarred, wooden fence of a cottager's yard sat a hooded crow. It puffed up its feathers, shook
itself, nodded, struck up an ear-shattering crowing and took off with a whistling wing-beat, to allow itself to be carried
off by the wind into the direction of the forest.
Of the inhabitants of the small hamlet, about twenty fishermen and forest-workers with their families, nothing was to be
seen.
The sound of a screeching voice broke the silence, so loud and shrill that the signalman paused involuntary in his
running. A wave of violently forced-out, discordant sounds struck his ears, which seemed to be coming out of the open
gabel-window of a house close by, which he knew only too well.
Making the noise of his footsteps as quiet as possible, he crept nearer and distinguished rather clearly the voice of his
wife. Only a few more steps further, and he was able to understand most of her words.
'What, you merciless, heartless scoundrel! Should the miserable worm cry out its belly from hunger? - What? Eh? Wait,
just wait, I'll teach you a lesson - I'll give you something to remember!' For a few moments it was quiet; then a noise
could be heard, like if pieces of clothing were being hit. Directly afterwards, a new storm of abusive words vented itself.
'You detestable, little idiot!' rang out in the quickest tempo. 'Do you mean that I ought to leave my own child to hunger,
because of such a miserable wretch like you?' she shouted, as a soft-wimpering became audible, 'Or I'll give you a beating
that you won't forget for a week.'
The wimpering did not fall silent.
The signalman felt his heart beating heavily and irregularly. He began to shake slightly. His glance hung, as if absent,
firmly on the ground, and his clumsy, hard hand several times pushed a tuft of wet hair to the side, which each time fell
back over his freckled brow.
For a moment, something threatened to over-power him. It was a cramp, which made his muscles swell and the fingers
of his hand clench into a fist. It abated and a dull weariness remained.


The signalman trod with unsure footsteps into the narrow tiled hallway. Wearily and slowly, he climbed the creaking
wooden stairs.
'Shame, shame, shame!' she began again, and in the process one could hear how someone spewed this out, three times in
succession, with all signs of rage and contempt. 'You detestable, vile, deceiptful, malicious, cowardly, nasty lout!' The
words followed each other in a rising tone and her voice, which she was forcing out, broke now and again from the
strain. 'What, you want to hit my boy? You miserable brat, you have the impudence to hit the helpless child on the
mouth? - What? - Eh, what? I do not want to dirty myself on you, however...'
At this moment, Thiel opened the living-room door, as the end of the started sentence stuck in the startled woman's
throat. She was as white as chalk with anger; her lips twitched violently; she raised up her right-hand, she lowered it, and
reached out for the milk jug, from which she tried to fill a baby's bottle. However, she left this task half finished, since
the greater part of the milk ran over the neck of the bottle on to the table. Completely beside herself through rage, she
reached in one moment for this thing, in the next moment for that thing, unable to hold on to it for longer than a few
seconds; and finally, she plucked up enough courage to scold her husband violently. What did it mean, that he had come
home at such an unusual time; he would not at all want to keep an eye on her; 'That would be still the last straw!' she
said, and straight afterwards, she had a clear conscience and she needed to lower her eyes before no-one.
Thiel heard little of what she said. He cast a fleeting glance over the small, howling Tobias. For a moment, it seemed as
if he had to forcibly hold back something terrible, which aroused in him; then the old apathy suddenly laid itself over his
tense expression, strangely revived by a furtive, longing gleam in his eyes.
For a seconds, he glanced over the powerful limbs of his wife, who, busying about with her face turned away, still sought
self-control. Her full, half-naked breasts swelled themselves from rage and threatened to spring from her bodice, and her
tucked-up skirt appeared to make her broad hips still broader. A power seemed to come from the woman,
unconquerable, inescapable, to which Thiel did not feel himself to be a match.
Like a fine spider's web, and just like a net of iron, it easily laid itself around him, binding, surmounting, enervating. In
this condition, he would not have been able to direct any word at her, at the very least a harsh one. And so Tobias, who
was bathed in tears, crouched, frightened, in a corner, had to watch how his father, without turning around to him again,
took his forgotten sandwiches from the oven shelf, holding them out to the mother as the only sign, and with a short,
distracted shake of the head, he immediately disappeared again.
Chapter Three
Although Thiel made his way back to his forest solitude with the greatest possible haste, he arrived, however, fifteen
minutes later than the official time at the place of his work.
His colleague, with whom he shared the duty, a man who had tuberculosis as a result of the quick, unavoidable
temperature changes on his duty, was already standing, ready to go, on the small, sandy platform of the little hut, whose
big number, black on white, shone for a long way through the trees.
The two men shook hands, exchanged a few, short pieces of information, and parted. One of them disappeared into the
hut, the other went across the track, taking the continuation of the path, which Thiel had used. One heard his convulsive
cough, first near by, then further away through the trees, and with this, the only human noise in this solitude went silent.
So Thiel began today, as always, with arranging things, for the night, in his way, in the narrow, square stone cage of the
signalman's hut. He did this mechanically, while his mind was pre-occupied with the impression of the last few hours.
He placed his supper on the narrow, brown, painted table by one of the two slit-like side-windows, from which one
could comfortably see across the track. Then he lit a fire in the small, rusty stove and placed a pot of cold-water on it.
Finally, after he had put the tools in order: shovel, spade, vice, etc., he began with the cleaning of his lantern, which he
filled immediately afterwards with fresh paraffin.
When this had been done, the bell announced, with three shrill strikes, which repeated itself, that a train from in the
direction of Breslau had left the next station. Without showing the smallest sign of haste, Thiel stayed for quite a while
still inside the hut; and he eventually made his way, flag and ammunition pouch in his hand, slowly into the open air and
moved himself, in a shuffling and sluggish manner, over the narrow sandy path, to the rail-crossing about twenty paces
away. Thiel closed and opened the barriers before and after each train, conscientiously, although the path was only rarely
used by someone passing.
He had finished his work, and he now leant, waiting, against the black and white barrier-post.
The track cut right and left in a straight line into the boundless, green forest, and to both sides, the mass of needles held
back, as it were, leaving a lane free between them, which the reddish-brown, gravel-strewn railway embankment filled
out. The black, parallel-running lines on this glistened in their entirety like a monstrous, iron meshing of a net, whose
narrow strands came together at the extremes of North and South at a point on the horizon.
The wind had got up and blew soft waves down along the edge of the forest and into the distance. From the telegraph
poles, which ran alongside the track, a buzzing harmony sounded. On the wires, which entwined themselves like a web


of a giant spider from pole to pole, flocks of twittering birds huddled together in close rows. A woodpecker, laughing,
flew away over Thiel's head, at which he did not even deign to give a glance.
The sun, which hung just under the edges of the mighty clouds, before sinking into the black-green sea of tree-tops,
poured streams of crimson over the forest. The pillared arcade of the trunks of the pine trees on that side of the
embankment themselves lit up, as it were, from the inside, and glowed like iron.
Also the lines began to glow, like fiery snakes; however, they went out first of all. And now the glow climbed slowly
from the ground into the sky; leaving behind, in cold fading light, first of all, the trunks of the pine trees, then the largest
part of their crowns, and finally, only touching the extreme edge of the tree-tops with a red shimmer. Silently and
solemnly, this was carried out like an exalted play. The signalman still stood motionless at the barrier. Finally he took a
step forward. A dark point on the horizon, there where the lines met each other, grew bigger. Growing from second to
second, it seemed as if it stood in once place. Suddenly, it had movement and got nearer. Through the lines went a
vibration and a buzzing, a rhythmical clicking, a muffled noise, which becoming louder and louder, and finally was not
dissimilar to the hoof-beats of a roaring, approaching squadron of cavalry.
A panting and roaring filled the air in fits and starts from the distance. Then, suddenly, the silence was ripped apart. A
racing thundering and raging filled the air, the lines bent, the earth shook - a strong thrust of air - a cloud of dust, steam
and smoke, and the black, snorting monster went by. And as it had grown, so the noise died away, little by little. The
dust went away. Shrunken to a point, the train disappeared in the distance, and the old, holy silence came over this
corner of the forest.
'Minna,' whispered the signalman, as if he woke from a dream, and he went back to his hut. After he had brewed himself
a weak coffee, he sat down and stared, from time to time taking a sip, at a dirty piece of newspaper, which he had picked
up from somewhere on the track.
Little by little, a rare uneasiness came over him. He pushed the piece of newspaper on to the stove's glowing embers,
whose light filled the room, and he tore off his jacket and waistcoat, in order to lighten himself. Since that did not help,
he got up, took a spade out of the corner and took himself off to the field, which had been given to him.
It was a narrow sandy strip, densely overgrown with weeds. Like a snow-white foam, the young blossom lay on the
branches of the two dwarf fruit-trees, which stood here.
Thiel became calm, and a quiet pleasure came over him.
Now, to work.
The spade cut into the ground, grinding; the wet clods of earth fell back with a thud, and broke apart.
For a time he dug without interruption. Then he paused suddenly and said loudly and audibly to himself, while he shook
his head back and forth, anxiously, 'No, no, that really cannot be', and again, 'No, no, that really cannot be.'
It suddenly occurred to him, that now Lene would indeed have to come out here often, in order to attend to the field,
through which then the traditional way of life would be put into serious disturbance. And suddenly, his joy of having the
field turned into a revulsion. Hastily, as if he had it in mind to do something terrible, he tore the spade out of the ground
and carried it back to the hut. Here, once again, he sunk into deep thought. He knew little of why, but the prospect of
having Lene with him on duty for whole days long, became for him, as so he very much tried to reconcile this, even
more intolerable. It seemed to him, as if he had something of value to defend, as if someone were trying to encroach
upon that which was most sacred to him; and his muscles tensed themselves involuntarily in a light cramp, while a short,
forced laugh came from his lips. He was shocked by the echo of this laugh, he looked up, and then, he lost the thread of
his thoughts. As he found it again, he burrowed back, as it were, into his old condition.
And suddenly, something like a thick, black curtain tore into two pieces, and his fogged-over eyes gained a clear view.
He felt for the first time, as if he had awoken from a two-year-long death-like sleep, and he now looked at all the hair-
raising things with an unbelieving shake of the head, which he ought to have done in this condition. The sorry story of
his eldest son, which only the impression of the last few hours had been able to seal, carried itself clearly before his soul.
Compassion and remorse seized him, just like a deep shame, that he had lived with the whole time in a humiliating
toleration, without taking care of the dear, helpless creature, not finding the strength to admit to himself how he
suffered.
Through all of his self-tormenting ideas, of all of his sins of omission, in a heavy tiredness, came over him, and so he fell
asleep with his back arched, his forehead on his hand, which lay on the table.
For a time, he lay like this, when, in a muffled voice, he called the name of Minna several times.
A roaring and buzzing filled his ears, like an immense mass of water; it became dark around him, he opened his eyes and
awoke. His limbs shook, a cold sweat from fear came through all his pores, his pulse was irregular, his face was wet from
tears.
It was pitch-dark. He wanted to look over to the door, but he did not know in which way he ought to turn. Staggering,
he got up, his great anxiety persisted still. The forest outside was roaring like a surging sea, the wind threw hail and rail


against the windows of the hut. Thiel aimlessly felt around with his hands. For a moment, he felt as if he were a
drowning man. Then suddenly, a blue, dazzling light shone, like when drops of unearthly light fade away into the earth's
dark atmosphere, and become instantly smothered by it.
This moment was enough for the signalman to bring himself together. He reached for his lantern, which, fortunately, he
caught hold of, and at this moment it began to thunder on the furthest edge of the Brandenburg night-sky. At first,
muffled and rolling with restraint, it rolled nearer in short, surging waves, until it, after growing into a monstrous force,
broke, flooding over the atmosphere, threatening, shaking and roaring.
The panes clattered, the ground quaked.
Thiel made light. His first glance, after he regained his composure, was for his watch. There was hardly five minutes
between now and the arrival of the express-train. Since he thought that he had not heard the signal-bell, he took himself,
as quickly as the storm and the darkness would allow, to the barrier. While he occupied himself closing the barrier, the
signal-bell rang. The wind tore its sound apart and threw it in all directions. The pine-trees bent and their branches
rubbed against each other, eerily creaking and squeaking. For a moment the moon became visible, as it lay just like a
pale-yellow shawl between the clouds. In its light, one saw the wind burrowing into the black crowns of the pine-trees.
The hanging leaves of the birch-trees on the railway embankment blew and flapped like ghostly horses' tails. Down
below lay the lines of the track, which glistening from the wet, and absorbed the pale moonlight in various places.
Thiel tore the cap from his head. The rain made him feel comfortable as it ran, mixing with the tears, over his face. His
brain brewed; unclear memories of that which he had seen in the dream dispelled each other. It seemed to him as if
Tobias were being ill-treated by someone, and indeed in such an horrific manner, that his heart stood still at the
thoughts. One of the other scenes, he remembered more clearly. He had seen his dead wife. She had come from
somewhere out of the distance on one of the railway-lines. She had looked really ill, and instead of clothes, she wore
rags. She had gone past Thiel's hut without looking at it, and finally - here the remembrances became unclear - she had,
for some reason or other, only moved forward with great difficulty, and she had even collapsed several times.
Thiel thought further, and now he knew, that she was in flight. It was now without all doubt as to why she had sent back
these anxiety-filled glances and had dragged herself further on, although her feet were failing her. Oh these terrible
glances!
But there was something that she was carrying with her, wrapped in cloth, something limp, bloody, pale, and the way in
which she looked down at it, reminded him of past events.
He thought about his dying wife, who had just given birth to a child, whom she had to leave behind, looking steadily
with an expression, which Thiel could just as little forget, as that of he had a mother and a father.
Where had she come from? He did not know that. But now it was clear before his soul: she had rejected him in not
looking at him; she had dragged herself further and further away through the stormy, dark night. He had shouted to her,
'Minna, Minna!' and he was awoken by this.
Two red, round lights penetrated the darkness like the goggle-eyes of a huge monster. A blood-coloured glow went
before them, which turned the raindrops in its area into drops of blood. It was as if blood were raining down from
heaven.
Thiel felt a horror, and as the train came ever nearer, an ever so large a fear; dream and reality for him melted into one.
Still he saw the wandering woman on the rails, and his hand felt for the ammunition pouch, as if he had the intention of
bringing the speeding train to a halt. Fortunately, it was too late, for already the lights shimmered before Thiel's eyes, and
the train roared by.
For the remaining part of the night, Thiel found little peace in his work. He felt urged to be at home. He longed to see
little Tobias again. He felt as if he had been separated from him for years. Finally, he had, several times, through
increasing worry about the condition of the boy, tried to leave his duty.
In order to pass the time, Thiel decided, as soon as it became light, to inspect his stretch of track. In his left hand a stick,
in his right hand a long, iron spanner, he went out then also straightaway into the dark-grey dawn-light on to the back of
a rail.
Now and again he tightened a bolt with the spanner or hit one of the round iron bars, which the lines bound together
under one another.
The rain and wind had gone, and between the tattered strips of cloud, a few pieces of a pale blue sky could be seen.
The monotonous knocking of his soles on the hard metal, together with the sleepy noise of the dripping trees, little by
little, calmed Thiel down.
At six o'clock in the morning, he was relieved and started on the path for home without delay.
It was a lovely Sunday morning.
The clouds had parted and had sunken half-way below the circle of the horizon. The sun poured, in its ascent, sparkling
like a huge, blood-red jewel, a pure sheet of light over the forest.


In sharp lines, the bundles of rays shot through the maze of the trunks, here an island of soft bracken, whose frond of
finely worked lace glistened, covered faintly with a glow, there the silver-grey lichen of the forest-floor turning into a red
coral.
From tree-tops, trunks and grasses flowed the fiery dew. A deluge of light appeared to be poured over of the earth.
There was a freshness in the air, which echoed right to the heart, and also behind Thiel's fore-head the pictures of the
night had to gradually fade.
However, the moment, at which he came into the small room and saw little Tobias more red-cheeked than ever lying in
the sun-lit bed, they had totally disappeared.
No doubt that this was so! During the course of the day, Lene thought several times that she had noticed something
strange in him; like in the church-pew, when he, instead of looking into the book, looked at her from the side, and then
also at lunch-time, when he, without saying a word, took the baby, which Tobias usually had to carry out into the street,
from Tobias' arms and placed it on her lap. Apart from these things, however, there was nothing the least strange about
him.
Thiel, who had not laid himself down throughout the day, crept to bed just towards nine o'clock, since he had day-duty
the following week. Just as he was on the point of falling asleep, he wife announced to him that she would go with him
on the following morning into the forest, in order to dig over the land and set the potatoes.
Thiel winced; he had become totally awake; however, his eyes stayed firmly shut.
Lene said that it was high time that something ought to be done with the potatoes, and she added that she had to take
the children with her, since it would presumably take the whole day. The signalman muttered a few incomprehensible
words, to which Lene did not pay any more attention. She had turned her back to him and busied herself in the light of a
tallow candle undoing her bodice and letting down her skirt.
Suddenly she turned around, without knowing herself for what reason, and looked into the earth-coloured face of her
husband, distorted with passion, who stared at her with burning eyes, half sat up, his hands on the bed clothes.
'Thiel!' his wife shouted, half angry, half shocked, and like a sleep-walker, on calling his name, he awoke from his stupor,
he stuttered a few confused words, threw himself back on to the pillow and pulled the bed-cover over his ears.
Lene was the first, who got up the following morning. Without making any noise, she prepared everything necessary for
the outing. The smallest child was laid in the pram, then Tobias was woken and dressed. When he learnt as to where he
was going, he had to smile. After everything was prepared and also the coffee was standing ready on the table, Thiel
awoke. Displeasure was the first feeling at the sight of all the things prepared. He probably would have liked to have said
something against it, but he did not know where to begin. And also, what convincing reasons could he have given to
Lene?
Gradually then, the small, increasingly beaming face began to exercise an influence over Thiel, so that finally, for the
sake of the joy, which the outing gave the boy, he was not able to think to raise any objection. Nevertheless, Thiel did
not remain free from restlessness during the walk through the forest. He pushed the small pram arduously through the
deep sand and had laid all kinds of the flowers on it, which Tobias had collected.
The boy was exceptionally cheerful. He hopped around in his little brown velvet-cap between the ferns and sought, in a
free, somewhat clumsy manner, to catch the clear-winged dragonflies, which flicked around overhead. As soon as they
had arrived, Lene went to inspect the field. She threw the small sack with the pieces of potato, which she had brought
for seed, on to the edge of the grassy edge of a birch-wood, she knelt down and ran some darkly coloured sand through
her hard fingers.
Thiel observed her eagerly: 'Now, how is it?'
'Just as good as the Spree-Ecke!' The signalman felt a burden go from his soul. He had feared that she would have been
discontented, and he scratched the stubble of his beard quietly.
After the woman had hastily consumed a thick crust of bread, she threw off her shawl and jacket and began to dig, with
the speed and stamina of a machine.
At particular intervals, she straightened herself up and took in deep breaths of air, but it was only for a moment each-
time, if the small baby had to be breast-fed, which she did hastily with a panting breast, dripping with sweat.
'I have to go to walk the track, I will take Tobias with me!' shouted the signalman after a while from the platform in
front of the hut over to her.
'Oh what! Nonsense!' she shouted back; 'Who will stay with the baby? Come over here!' she shouted back louder, while
the signalman, as if could not hear her, went off with small Tobias.
At first, she wondered as to whether she ought to run after them, and only the loss of time prevented her from leaving
the work. Thiel went along the track with Tobias. The small boy was very excited; everything was new and strange for
him. He did not understand what the thin, black lines, warmed by the sun-light meant. Mercilessly, he asked all kinds of


peculiar questions. Of all the things, the ringing of the telegraph-poles was the most strange. Thiel knew the sound of
each single one in his area, so that he would always have known, with closed eyes, on which part of the line he was.
Often he stopped, Tobias by his hand, in order to listen to the wonderful sounds, which streamed from the wood like
the sonorous chanting from the inside of a church. The poles towards the south of his area had an especially full and
beautiful chord. There was a throng of sounds from the insides, which rang forth, without interruption, in one breath, as
it were; and Tobias ran around the weather-beaten wood, in order to, as he thought, discover, by means of an opening,
the maker of the lovely sound. The signalman changed into a solemn mood, similarly like in church. Moreover, with
time, he distinguished a voice, which reminded him of his dead wife. He imagined this to be a choir of belovd spirits, in
which she mixed her voice, and this idea awoke in him a yearning, an emotion to tears.
Tobias asked for some flowers, which were to the side, and Thiel, as always, gave them to him.
Pieces of blue sky seemed to have sunken on to the floor of the wood, for the small, blue flowers stood there so
amazingly close together. Just like little fluttering coloured-flags, the butterflies flitted silently between the shining white
of the tree-trunks, meanwhile a gentle drizzle fell through the pale green leafy-masses of the crowns of the birch-trees.
Tobias picked flowers and his father looked at him, pondering. Occasionally the latter raised his view and looked
through the gaps in the clouds in the sky, which absorbed the golden light of the sun like an enormous, perfectly blue
crystal bowl.
'Father, is that the Dear Lord?' the small boy asked suddenly, on seeing a small brown squirrel, which darted over to a
pine-tree, standing alone, with scraping noises on the trunk.
'Silly lad,' was all that Thiel could reply, while torn-away pieces of bark fell from the trunk in front of his feet.
The mother was still digging, when Thiel and Tobias came back. Half of the field had already been turned over.
The trains followed each-other in short intervals, and Tobias watched them roar past, each time open-mouthed.
The mother herself had her pleasure in his funny face-pulling.
The lunch, consisting of potatoes and the remainder of a cold pork-roast, was consumed in the hut. Lene had tidied up,
and also Thiel seemed to want to submit to the inevitable with good decency. He talked with his wife during the meal
about all kinds of things that were done in his job. And so, he asked her whether she could imagine for herself that in a
single piece of rail there were forty-six bolts, and in others more.
In the morning Lene had finished turning over the soil; in the afternoon the potatoes ought to be planted. She declared
that Tobias would look after the baby, and she took him with her.
'Make sure...' shouted Thiel after her, seized by sudden anxiety, '...make sure that he does not go too close to the lines!'
A shrug of the shoulders was Lene's answer.
The Silesian express-train had been announced, and Thiel had to be at his post. He had just stood at the barrier, in
readiness, when already he heard it roaring towards him.
The train became visible, - it came closer - in countless, quick bursts, the steam hissed from the locomotive's black stack.
There: one, two, three, milky-white streams of steam welled upwards, straight as a die, and similarly, the air brought with
it the whistle of the locomotive - three times, in succession, short, piercing and frightening. - They are braking, thought
Thiel, but why? And again, the emergency whistle, piercing, sounded this time in a long, unbroken line, waking the echo.
Thiel moved forwards, in order to be able to look along the line. Mechanically, he pulled the red flag out of the case and
held it out in front of him over the lines. - Jesus Christ! - Was he blind? Jesus Christ! - Oh Jesus, Jesus Christ! What was
that? There! - There, between the lines... 'Stop!' shouted the signalman with all his might. It was too late. A dark mass
had been pulled under the train and was thrown around between the wheels, here and there, like a rubber-ball. A few
moments later, and one heard the jarring and squealing of the brakes. The train stopped.
The isolated track was brought to life. Guards and ticket-inspectors ran across the gravel to the end of the train. Out of
every window peered curious faces, and now - the crowd came together and moved to the front.
Thiel was panting; he had to hold on to himself, in order not to fall to the ground like a killed bull. Truthfully, they
wavedto him, 'No!'
A shriek tore the air at the place of the accident, a howl followed, like it was coming from an animal's throat. Who was
that?! Lene?! It was not her voice, and yet...
A man came hurrying along the track.
'Signalman!'
'What has happened here?'
'An accident!' ...The messenger recoiled, for the signalman's eyes moved strangely. His hat was crooked, his red hair
seemed to be standing up.
'He is still alive, perhaps there is still a chance.'
A groan was the only answer.
'Come quickly! Quickly!'


Thiel picked himself up suddenly with immense strain. His limp muscles tightened themselves; he stood erect, his face
was vacant and dead.
He ran with the messenger, he did not see the deadly-pale, shocked faces of the travellers in the train windows. A young
woman shouted out, there was a business traveller in a fez, a young couple, apparently on their honeymoon. What was
he concerned about? He did not pay any attention the the contents of this rattling box, his ears were filled with Lene's
howling. Swimming around before his eyes, he saw innumerable yellow spots, like glow-worms. He recoiled; he stood
there. Out of the dance of the glow-worms emerged something pale, limp and bleeding: a forehead beaten black and
blue, blue lips, over which black blood dripped. It was him.
Thiel did not speak. His face took on a dirty expression. He smiled as if absent; finally he bent down, and felt the limp,
dead limbs heavy in his arms; he wrapped the red flag around him.
He went.
To where?
'To the district doctor! To the district doctor!' everybody shouted.
'We will take him with us,' called the baggage-master, and made in his wagon a stretcher out of work-clothes and books.
'Now then?'
Thiel made no sign of letting go of the accident-victim. They urged him. Useless. The baggage-master passed the
stretcher out of the luggage-wagon and ordered a man to assist the father.
Time is costly. The guard's whistle sounded. Coins rained out of the windows.
Lene behaved as if she were beside herself. 'The poor, poor woman,' she was called in the compartment, 'The poor, poor
mother!'
The guard whistled again - a whistle - the locomotive threw out white, hissing steam from its cylinders and stretched its
iron sinews; a few seconds later, and the courier-train thundered at double-speed through the forest in a streaming cloud
of smoke.
The signalman, having changed his mind, laid the half-dead boy on to the stretcher. There he lay, there in his broken
figure, and now and again a long, rattling breath raised his chest, which could be seen under the tattered shirt. His small
arms and small legs, not only broken at the joints, took on an unnatural shape. The heel of his small foot was turned
towards the front. His arm hung loosely over the edge of the stretcher.
Lene whimpered continuously; every trace of her former defiance moved from her nature. She repeated continually a
story, that she ought to be cleared of all blame for the incident.
Thiel seemed not to notice her; with a terribly frightened expression, his eyes clung to the child.
It became quiet all around, deadly quiet; black and hot, the lines lay on the brilliant gravel. At midday the wind had gone,
and the forest stood motionless, like stone.
The men discussed things with one another quietly. One had to, in order to take the quickest route to Friedrichshagen,
go back to the station, which was in the direction of Breslau, since the next train, a speeded-up local train, obviously did
not stop at Friedrichshagen.
Thiel seemed to be considering as to whether he ought to go along. But at the moment, there was nobody there who
understood the work. A silent hand-movement signalled to his wife to take the stretcher; she did not dare to refuse,
although she was concerned for the infant left-behind. Thiel accompanied the procession to the end of his area, then he
stopped, and looked at it for a long time. Suddenly he struck the flat of his hand on his forehead, which sounded for a
long way.
He meant to wake himself up, 'It is dream, like yesterday,' he said to himself, - useless. - Swaying more as he ran, he
reached his hut. Inside, he fell on to the ground, face-down. His cap rolled into the corner, his carefully-looked-after
watch fell out his pocket, the top sprung open, the glass broke. It was as if an iron fist had stopped him, grabbed by the
neck, so tight that he was not able to move, so much that under his moaning and groaning, he sought to free himself.
His forehead was cold, his eyes dry, his throat burned.
The signal-bell woke him. Under the influence of each of the self-repeating three strikes of the bell, the fit elapsed. Thiel
was able to get up and do his duty. His feet were as heavy as lead, the track circled around him like the spoke of a huge
wheel, whose axle was his head; however, he gained enough strength to hold himself erect for some time.
The passenger-train came along. Tobias had to be in there. Each time it moved nearer, the more the pictures swam
before Thiel's eyes. Finally, he only saw the boy, broken to pieces, with his bloody mouth. Then it became night.
After a while, he awoke from a faint. He found himself lying close to the barrier in the hot sand. He stood up, shook the
grains of sand from his clothes and spat them out of his mouth. His head became a little more free, and was able to
think more calmly.


In the hut, he immediately took his watch from the floor and laid it on the table. It had not stopped, despite the fall. For
two hours, he counted the seconds and the minutes, while he imagined that which he wanted to happen to Tobias. Now
Lene arrived with him; now she stood in front of the doctor. He examined and felt the boy, and shook his head.
'Bad, very bad - but perhaps... Who knows?' He examined him more closely. 'No,' he said then, 'No, its over.'
'Over, over!' moaned the signalman, but then he got up and shouted, his rolling eyes raised to the ceiling, his raised
hands, turned involuntarily into a fist, and with his voice, as if he had to burst the small room apart, 'He must, must live!
I tell you, he must, must live!' And now he kicked open the hut's door again, through which the red fire of evening broke
in, and he ran, more as he went, back to the barrier. Here, he stopped for a while, as if perplexed, and then suddenly, he
moved, both arms stretched out, into the middle of the track, as if he wanted to stop something, which came from the
direction of the local train. With this, his widely open eyes gave the impression of blindness.
While he, stepping backwards, seemed to retreat from something, he exclaimed strongly through his teeth in single, half-
comprehensible words, 'You, do you hear, just stay. You, just listen, stay. Give him back, he's beaten black and blue. Yes,
yes, good, I will beat her black and blue, do you hear? Just stay, give him back to me.'
It seemed as if something were going past him, for he turned and moved, in order to follow it in the other direction.
'You, Minna!' - His voice became a whimpering, like that of a small child - 'You, Minna, do you hear? Give him back, I
want to...' He felt around in the air as if to hold somebody back. 'Little woman, yes, then I want her... And then I want to
beat her also, black and blue, beat her as well, and I want to beat her with the chopper, do you see? The kitchen
chopper, the kitchen chopper, I want to hit her with, and then she will die.
And then, yes, with the chopper, the kitchen chopper, yes, black blood!' There was froth around his mouth, his glazed-
over pupils moved violently.
A gentle evening wind blew softly and continually over the forest, and fiery-pink curly clouds hung in the western sky.
He had followed the invisible something, for about one hundred steps, when he stopped, apparently despondent, and
with terrible fear in his mind, the man stretched his arms out, pleading, imploring. He strained his eyes and shaded them
with his hand, as if to discover the unreal in the distance once again. Finally, his hands dropped, and the strained
expression on his face turned into dull lack of expression; he turned around and dragged himself back along the track,
along which he came.
The sun poured its last light over the forest and then faded. The trunks of the pine-trees stretched themselves like pale,
decaying limbs between the tree-tops, which hung on them like a layer of grey-black mould. The hammering of a
woodpecker penetrated the silence. Across the cold, steel-blue sky went a single, late red-cloud. It was as cold as a cellar,
so that the signalman froze. Everything was new to him, everything strange. He did not know what it was that he was
walking on, or that which surrounded him. Then a squirrel hurried over the track, and Thiel thought. He had to think
about the Dear Lord, without knowing why. 'The Dear Lord jumps over the track, the Dear Lord jumps over the track.'
He repeated this sentence several times, in order to, as it were, find something that had to do with it. He interrupted
himself, a gleam fell into his mind, 'But my God, that is really crazy!' He forgot everything and turned himself against
this new enemy. He sought to bring order into his thoughts - useless! It was an endless roaming and wandering. He
surprised himself at the most foolish idea and he shuddered in the knowledge of his powerlessness.
Out of the nearby small birch-wood, came the cry of a child. It was a sign of rage. Almost against his will, he had to
hurry over there, and he found the infant, about which nobody troubled themselves any more, crying and thrashing
around, lying in the pram without bedding. What did he want to do? What brought him over here? A swirling current of
feelings and thoughts engulfed this question.
'The Dear Lord jumps over the track.' Now he knew what that meant. 'Tobias' - She had murdered him, Lene, he was
entrusted to her - 'Stepmother, cruel-mother,' he grunted, 'and her brat lives!' A red fog clouded his mind, the two eyes
of the child penetrated through him; he felt something soft, fleshy between his fingers. Gurgling and whistling, mixed
with a hoarse crying out, met his ears, and he did not know from whom they came.
Then something fell into his mind, like drops of hot sealing-wax, and it lifted itself like a stiffness from his spirit.
Coming to consciousness, he heard the echo of the announcement-bell ringing through the air.
Suddenly, he understood, what he had wanted to do: his hand loosened itself from the throat of the child, which turned
under his grip. It sought breath and then it began to cough and to cry.
'It lives, thank the Lord, it lives!' He left it lying there and he hurried to the crossing. Dark smoke rolled across the track
in the distance, and the wind pushed it down on to the ground. Behind it, he heard the puffing of a locomotive, which
sounded like the sudden jerking, tormented breathing of an ill giant.
A cold twilight lay over the area.
After a while, when the smoke-clouds parted, Thiel recognised the gravel-train, which was going back with empty trucks
and was carrying the workers, who had been working throughout the day on the line.


The train had a generous schedule and was allowed to stop everywhere, in order to pick up the workers, still busy, here
and there, and to drop others off. A good way before Thiel's hut, the train began to brake. A loud squeaking, clattering,
rattling and clinking penetrated for a long way into the evening silence, until the train stood silently after a single, shrill,
long-drawn-out whistle.
About fifty male and female workers, were distributed in the trucks. Almost all of them were standing, a few of the men
with bared heads. In all of their beings lay a mysterious solemnity. When they became visible by the signalman, a
whispering started up between them. The older ones took their pipes from between their yellow teeth and held them
respectfully in their hands. Now and again, a woman would turn to blow her nose. The guard climbed down on to the
track and went up to Thiel. The workers saw how solemnly he shook his hand, whereon Thiel walked with slow,
strongly military steps to the last wagon.
None of the workers dared to speak to him, although all of them knew him.
Out of the last wagon, the small Tobias was lifted out.
He was dead.
Lene followed him; her face was a bluish-white, brown circles lay around her eyes.
Thiel did not deign to look at her; but she was shocked at the sight of her husband. His cheeks were hollow, his
eyelashes and beard were stuck together, his parting seemed to her to be more grey than before. There were the marks of
dried tears all over his face; there was a restless light in his eyes, and she was overcome with horror by this.
For a while, an unholy stillness ruled. A deep, terrible pensiveness took hold of Thiel. It became darker. A pack of deer
stood to the side on the railway-embankment. The roebuck stood in the middle, between the lines. He turned his thin
neck curiously around, then the locomotive whistled, and like lightening, he disappeared together with his herd.
At this moment, when the train put itself into motion, Thiel collapsed.
The train stopped again, and a discussion took place about what ought now be done. It was decided to put the child's
body for the meantime in the signalman's hut, and instead of the body, to take home, by means of the stretcher, the
raving signalman, whom they had no means of bringing back to consciousness.
And so it was. Two men carried the stretcher with the unconscious man, followed by Lene, who continually sobbing, her
faced covered with tears, pushed the pram with the baby through the sand.
Like a huge, glowing, crimson ball, the moon lay between the pine-tree-trunks on the forest-floor. The higher it rose, the
smaller it seemed to become, and the paler it became. Finally, it hung, just like a hanging lamp, over the forest, pushing a
mass of hazy light through all the holes and gaps in the tree-tops, which coloured the faces of the people in the little
procession there as if they were dead bodies.
Sprightly but carefully, they moved forward, now through the densely packed young-wood, then further on, along
through the tall trees, which had already been standing there for a long time; there the pale light had collected like in
large, dark basins.
The unconscious man rolled from side to side, or began to hallucinate. Several times he punched out with his fists, and
with closed eyes, tried to get up.
It was a lot of trouble to get him across the Spree; they had to cross over a second time, in order to fetch the wife and
the child.
When they got up on to the small rise of the hamlet, they met a few inhabitants, who immediately received the message
about the accident.
The whole hamlet got up.
In the face of her acquaintances, Lene broke out into a new wailing.
They carried the ill man, with some difficulty, up the stairs into his flat and brought him directly to the bed. The workers
turned around immediately, in order to fetch little Tobias' body.
Old experienced people recommended cold compresses, and Lene followed their advice with eagerness and prudence.
She placed towels into ice-cold spring water and renewed them, for the burning forehead of the unconscious man had
heated them through. Fearfully she watched the breathing of the ill man, which seemed to her to be more regular every
minute.
The excitement of the day had taken a lot out of her, and she decided to sleep a little, but she found no rest. No matter
whether she opened or closed her eyes, the recent events were brought before her. The infant slept, she had concerned
herself little with it, compared with her usual. She had become a totally different person. Nowhere was there a mark of
her earlier defiance. Yes, this ill man with the colourless, face, shiny with sweat, ruled her in his sleep.
A cloud covered the moon, it became darker in the room, and Lene heard only the heavy, but regular, breathing of her
husband. She considered whether she ought to make light. It was eerie for her in the darkness. When she wanted to
stand up, all her limbs became as heavy as lead, her eyelids closed, she fell asleep.


After the course of a few hours, when the men returned with body of the child, they found the house door wide open.
Confused by this, they went up the stairs into the upper flat, whose door was in the same way wide open.
They called the name of the woman several times, without getting an answer. Finally they stuck a match on the wall, and
the light, bursting forth, revealed a ghastly devastation.
'Murder! Murder!'
Lene lay in her own blood, her face unrecognisable, her skull battered.
'He has murdered his wife! He has murdered his wife!'
Panicking, they ran around. The neighbours came, one of them banged into the cradle. 'Holy heaven!' And he recoiled,
pale, with a terror-stricken expression. There lay the child with a slit throat.
The signalman had disappeared; the search, which was started the same night, stayed without success. In the morning
the relief signalman found him between the lines, sitting on the spot, where Tobias had been run over.
He held the brown stocking-cap in his hand and fondled it continually, like something that had life.
The signalman directed a few questions at him, however, he received no answer, and soon noticed that he was dealing
with someone insane.
The man at the main signal-box, who was informed of this, telegraphed for help.
Now more men tried to entice him from the lines through friendly persuasion; however, useless!
The express train, which passed at this time, had to stop; and it was only through the train-staff's over-powering that
they succeeded in removing the ill man, by force, from the track, who immediately began to rage.
They had to bind his hands and feet, and the policeman, who had been summoned in the meantime, supervised his
transport to the Berlin remand-prison, from which, however, he was transferred on the first day to the lunatic asylum of
the Charit. On his delivery, he still held the small brown cap in his hands, and he guarded it with jealous care and
tenderness.



Bahnwrter Thiel Notes

Chapter One
signalman
Hauptmann uses several words throughout the book to describe Thiel. For continuity, 'signalman' is preserved
throughout. The Bahnwrter, or signalman, was in the lowest-paid group of workers in the German Railways, as
organised before the Second World War.
Neu-Zittau
Neu-Zittau is a real village about 50km south-east of Berlin. This is the main village of Thiel's area. Neu Zittau was in
the GDR.
ditch alongside the track
Alongside many railway-tracks, of which this is one, there is a ditch, into which water can flow, collect and disperse to
prevent it flooding the line, and undermining its structure.
Schn-Schornstein
This is the hamlet near Neu-Zittau where Thiel lived.
Spree
The Spree is a slow-moving river which flows through the forests around Berlin, and through Berlin itself. The area
through which it flows is called the Spreewald. In recent times, the river was famous as the scene of various escape
attempts from East to West Berlin, before the removal of the Berlin Wall.
her lot
This is direct translation, which has no equivalent idiomatic meaning in English.
Alte-Grund
This is an agricultural area near to Neu-Zittau.
parish-priest
The clergyman is no doubt Protestant. Although 'priest' is a general term for a member of the clergy, it is very often
associated with a Catholic. Here, 'priest' makes for a better translation.
Father
Although 'Father' would be the preferred form of address to a Catholic priest, here 'Father' makes for a batter
translation.
hussy
This is a direct translation from the German. The more modern translation of the word would be 'slut'. It is a
characteristic of Novellen to allow the author some way of expressing his personal feelings towards a character. In this
Novella, Hauptmann perhaps uses the feelings of the villagers to echo his thoughts.
nearly always
The German uses 'not seldom', which is best translated as 'nearly always'.
Brandenburg
The German adjective for this is 'mrkisch'. Brandenburg was the chief province of Prussia. Characteristic of the
province are the pine-forests, which flourish in the poor soil, and the lakes.
their
'Their' refers to the original owners of the bottle of wine.
spring
The German word used is 'Brunnen', which has several meanings, the most likely of which is 'spring'. A favoured
alternative would be 'well', but taking its isolation into account, this is unlikely.

Chapter Two
railway-inspector
The railway-inspector or Bahnmeister was an official of fairly high rank in the railway system and was fairly well paid
compared to the signalmen such as Thiel.
magic formula
It was tradition to sing such a song while making these pipes.
snotty-nosed
This is a direct translation from the German.


timber forest
The pine forests in the surrounding of Neu-Zittau were used extensively for timber production. See note on
'Brandenburg' above.
young wood
This was an area of land on which saplings had been planted to replace those trees which were cut down.
she shouted
The German in fact does not refer to Lene herself, but to the words being shouted. In translation, it is less clumsy to
refer to the speaker.
she began again
See note above on 'she shouted'.
last straw
The German literally says 'that would be the last'. This is best translated idiomatically as '...last straw'. Compare this use
of 'das Letzte' here with the 'das ganze', used in chapter 1 - see note above on 'her lot'.
tucked-up skirt
It was the fashion in such times for women to wear several layers of skirt. Through anger, Lene's layers of skirt have
ridden up around her hips, making them seem broader.

Chapter Three
black and white
Black and white were the old national colours of the German province of Prussia, where the story takes place.
of the forest
In the third chapter, Hauptmann uses two breaks in the text. These are indicated by a line separating the paragraphs.
This is the first of these breaks, signalling a change from the former descriptive text to the action text.
piece of newspaper
The German refers to the piece of newspaper with the pronoun 'it'. For a better translation, this has been substituted
with the noun.
unearthly light
This is perhaps a reference to a shooting-star.
a mother and a father
Here, Hauptmann tries to impress upon the reader that Thiel cannot forget his wife's expression, just as much as the fact
that nobody can forget that they have a mother and a father. Hauptmann may have used this expression in order to
maintain the naturalistic theme in the book.
goggle-eyes of a monster
behind Thiel's fore-head
This means in Thiel's mind.
letting down her skirt
See note for 'tucked up skirt'.
Spree-Ecke
This is the area of land which Thiel and Lene had used for potato farming until they received the notice of the
termination of the lease. 'Spree-Ecke' is literally the Spree-corner, implying that the field was situated on a bend of the
river Spree.
very excited
The German uses 'not a little', best translated as 'very'.
belovd spirits
German often uses the adjective 'lieb', approximate meaning 'dear', and is usually attributed to loved ones and to deities.
There is no direct equivalent in English, but here, 'belovd' suffices. (see note for 'Dear Lord', below)
the latter
This means Thiel.
Dear Lord
There is no direct equivalent in English, but here, 'Dear' suffices. (see note for 'belovd spirits', above)
silly lad


Lene's answer
This is the second, and final, break in the text of chapter three, when there is a move to the accident and Thiel's decline.
See also the note for 'of the forest'.
between the lines
The remarks between the dashes could have been made by the author, by the train driver/guard or by Thiel himself.
like a killed bull
Hauptmann may have used this phrase (see also the note for 'a mother and a father') to maintain the naturalistic theme.
waved
Here, the German ceases to use the imperfect tense for the action of the story. It reverts to the present, which
technically is the historic present tense, which is translated as a past tense in English. Note however, that many of the
description verbs remain in the imperfect, together a few of the action verbs.
fez
The fez is a traditional Arabic head covering. It is best described to be like a dark-red upturned flower pot, made from
thick woollen material, with a black tasselled cord attached to the centre of the flat-end, extending down the side.
rattling box
This means the carriage full of people.
black and blue
The phrase 'black and blue' exists in German, but as 'brown and blue'.
It was him.
The German refers to 'it' not 'him'. The reference is to 'Tobiaschen', a neuter noun.
around him
The German refers to 'it' not 'him'. The reference is to 'Tobiaschen', a neuter noun.
district doctor
The German for 'district doctor' is 'Bahnarzt', literally 'railway doctor'. In these fairly backward areas of Germany at this
time, the railway was the only outside link there was, and therefore, a doctor was appointed by the railway administration
for a particular area.
procession
The procession consists of Lene and the unnamed man, ordered to assist the family, who are carrying the stretcher, on
which Tobias is lying.
reached
The German text reverts to the imperfect tense for the action of the story from the present. See also the note for
'waved'.
became night
This does not mean that it literally became night, but for Thiel, it became night, in that he fainted.
back to me
This section, in which Thiel is rambling, is very difficult to translate directly, so paraphrasing has been used to overcome
certain difficulties. Some modal verbs are given in the German text with no infinitive, and so an appropriate one has
been added for translation purposes.
will die
The German does not use the standard verb for people dying ('sterben'), but uses the verb for animals dying
('verrecken'). This has perhaps been done to emphasize Thiel's hate for Lene.
track
The German uses the word for 'path' and not 'track'; but since we have been told that Thiel has been walking along the
track, the word is used here and later on for continuity.
Dear Lord
There is no direct equivalent in English, but here, 'Dear' suffices.
track
The German uses the word for 'path' and not 'track'; but since we have been told that Thiel has been walking along the
track, the word is used here and later on for continuity.
Gurgling...they came
The order of this sentence has been changed for translation.
generous schedule
The gravel-train was a train which carried workers and materials for the building and maintenance of track. Obviously, a


strict timetable for such a train could not be laid down, so it was given a generous schedule, in that ample time was given
for it to stop as often as was necessary.
bared heads
This means that they were not wearing a cap or a hat.
young wood
This was an area of land on which saplings had been planted to replace those trees which were cut down.
spring
Spring is used for continuity of translation, although in the hamlet, there may indeed have been a well. The German
word used is 'Brunnen', which has several meanings, the most likely of which is 'spring'. A favoured alternative would be
'well', but taking its isolation into account, this is unlikely.
ruled...sleep
Hauptmann had described earlier how Lene had ruled over Thiel (see chapter one), and now he describes how Thiel has
rule over Lene.
stocking-cap
This could be translated as 'fur-cap', but considering the time of year, June, it is more likely to be a stocking-cap.
However, Hauptmann earlier described Tobias, on walking to the line on Monday morning, to be wearing a velvet-cap.
This could be an error on Hauptmann's part.
signalman
Up to this point, Thiel has been described as the signalman. From the time of Tobias' return, dead, Thiel is totally unable
to do the job of signalman, and so Hauptmann may have considered Thiel to have resigned the position; also,
Hauptmann does not refer to Thiel as the signalman following his collapse. This reference to 'signalman' is for the relief-
signalman.
Charit
The Charit is a famous hospital in Berlin, to whose psychiatric section ('lunatic asylum') Thiel is transferred.


The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity--but that
would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at
any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and PERHAPS--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief
to my mind)--PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the
matter with one but temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency--what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites--whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely
forbidden to "work" until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal--having to be so sly about it, or else meet
with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus--but John says the very
worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.
So I will let it alone and talk about the house.
The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes
me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate
little houses for the gardeners and people.


There is a DELICIOUS garden! I never saw such a garden--large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with
long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.
There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.
There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for
years.
That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care--there is something strange about the house--I can feel it.
I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window.
I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous
condition.
But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself--before him, at least, and
that makes me very tired.
I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and
such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.
He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.
He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to
value it more.
He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. "Your exercise
depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the
time." So we took the nursery at the top of the house.
It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery
first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are
rings and things in the walls.
The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the
head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a
worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when
you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles,
destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.


No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.
There comes John, and I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a word.
We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.
I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I
please, save lack of strength.
John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.
I am glad my case is not serious!
But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.
John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him.
Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!
I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,--to dress and entertain, and other things.
It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!
And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous.
I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!
At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing
was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.
He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then
that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.
"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three
months' rental."
"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."
Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished,
and have it whitewashed into the bargain.
But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.
It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him
uncomfortable just for a whim.
I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.


Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and
bushes and gnarly trees.
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded
lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but
John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-
making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and
good sense to check the tendency. So I try.
I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.
But I find I get pretty tired when I try.
It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will
ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let
me have those stimulating people about now.
I wish I could get well faster.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and
those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up
and down the line, one a little higher than the other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used
to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children
could find in a toy store.
I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always
seemed like a strong friend.
I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.
The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I
suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such
ravages as the children have made here.
The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother--they must have had
perseverance as well as hatred.
Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy
bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.
But I don't mind it a bit--only the paper.
There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.


She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the
writing which made me sick!
But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.
There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A
lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.
This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in
certain lights, and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure,
that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
There's sister on the stairs!
Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little
company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.
Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.
But it tired me all the same.
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.
But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my
brother, only more so!
Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.
I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.
And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me
alone when I want her to.
So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good
deal.
I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps BECAUSE of the wall-paper.
It dwells in my mind so!
I lie here on this great immovable bed--it is nailed down, I believe--and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as
good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been
touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a
conclusion.


I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation,
or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.
It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of "debased Romanesque"
with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic
horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its
going in that direction.
They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines
directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,--the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common
centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.
I don't know why I should write this.
I don't want to.
I don't feel able.
And I know John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way--it is such a relief!
But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.
John says I musn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and
wine and rare meat.
Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the
other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.
But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself,
for I was crying before I had finished.
It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.
And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read
to me till it tired my head.
He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.


He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run
away with me.
There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.
If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an
impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.
I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you
see.
Of course I never mention it to them any more--I am too wise,--but I keep watch of it all the same.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder--I begin to
think--I wish John would take me away from here!
It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.
But I tried it last night.
It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.
I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.
John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wall-paper till I
felt creepy.
The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.
I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper DID move, and when I came back John was awake.
"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that--you'll get cold."
I though it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he would take me
away.
"Why darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before.
"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger, I
could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are
gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you."
"I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it
is worse in the morning when you are away!"


"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining
hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"
"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.
"Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is
getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!"
"Better in body perhaps--" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern,
reproachful look that I could not say another word.
"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for
one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is
a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"
So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't,
and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or
separately.
On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal
mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you
are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an
interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions--why, that is something like it.
That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself,and that is that it changes as
the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east window--I always watch for that first long, straight ray--it changes so quickly
that I never can quite believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlight--the moon shines in all night when there is a moon--I wouldn't know it was the same paper.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The
outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is
a woman.
By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the
hour.


I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.
Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.
And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake--O no!
The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.
He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.
It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,--that perhaps it is the paper!
I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent
excuses, and I've caught him several times LOOKING AT THE PAPER! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand
on it once.
She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner
possible, what she was doing with the paper--she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite
angry--asked me why I should frighten her so!
Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and
John's, and she wished we would be more careful!
Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it
out but myself!
Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to
watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.
John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my
wall-paper.
I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper--he would make fun of
me. He might even want to take me away.
I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough.
I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a
good deal in the daytime.
In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.
There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I
have tried conscientiously.
It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw--not beautiful ones like
buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.


But there is something else about that paper--the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so
much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not,
the smell is here.
It creeps all over the house.
I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.
It gets into my hair.
Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it--there is that smell!
Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.
It is not bad--at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.
In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house--to reach the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOR of the paper! A yellow smell.
There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes
behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even SMOOCH, as if it had been rubbed over and over.
I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round--round and round and
round--it makes me dizzy!
I really have discovered something at last.
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.
The front pattern DOES move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her
crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them
hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that
is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.
I think that woman gets out in the daytime!
And I'll tell you why--privately--I've seen her!


I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry
vines.
I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!
I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once.
And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don't want
anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.
I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.
But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at a time.
And though I always see her, she MAY be able to creep faster than I can turn!
I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.
If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.
I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much.
There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his
eyes.
And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give.
She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.
John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!
He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.
As if I couldn't see through him!
Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.
It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.
Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town over night, and won't be out until this evening.
Jennie wanted to sleep with me--the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.
That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake
the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.


I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.
A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.
And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would finish it to-day!
We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before.
Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.
She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.
How she betrayed herself that time!
But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me--not ALIVE!
She tried to get me out of the room--it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed
I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner--I would call when I woke.
So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that great bedstead
nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.
We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow.
I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.
How those children did tear about here!
This bedstead is fairly gnawed!
But I must get to work.
I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.
I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.
I want to astonish him.
I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!
But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!
This bed will NOT move!
I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner--but it hurt my
teeth.
Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All
those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!


I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the
bars are too strong even to try.
Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.
I don't like to LOOK out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?
But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope--you don't get ME out in the road there!
I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot
lose my way.
Why there's John at the door!
It is no use, young man, you can't open it!
How he does call and pound!
Now he's crying for an axe.
It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!
"John dear!' said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said--very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"
"I can't", said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it
of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.
"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"


Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over
him every time!


XVIII. Student Notes



Student Notes: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"



A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
Study Questions: "
Look into other forms of "fantastic" literature, such as fairy tales, science fiction, mythology, superhero comics, or folk
legends. Choose specific works of at least two different types, and compare their styles and techniques to those of
"magic realism" as represented by this story.
Compare the manner in which Garca Mrquez treats the traditional idea of angels in "A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings" with the way angels are represented or interpreted elsewhere, in some other work or media. Potential sources
include feature films, television shows, religious or inspirational literature, and advertising.
Be an amateur "magic realist," loosely following the formula Garca Mrquez employed for "A Very Old Man with
Enormous Wings." For this assignment, your "village" is any other story you have already studied; the "angel" will be
another character you introduce from "outside" the story, chosen because he or she seems totally alien to the sense of
the story as you have come to know it. It could be a character from outside literature: a pop culture celebrity, a
representative from another time or culture-anyone who seems not to belong at all in the world constructed by the
author of your story. Re-write or outline the story, incorporating the viewpoint of your new character and making the
other characters respond to their ill-fitting new companion.

Source Citation:
"Study Questions: 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings'." EXPLORING Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003.
Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 16 Feb. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.do?&contentSet=GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=SRC-
1&docId=EJ2112400089&source=gale&srcprod=SRCG&userGroupName=tlc139095056&version=1.0>.
Additional Material:
"Un Seor muy viejo con unas alas enormes"
Also known as: "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
Hispanic Literature Criticism, volume(s) 1:636
Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 8:160, 167-70, 182, 186; 83:149-50, 152, 183-84
Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume(s) 2:149; 47:146, 148, 151; 170:149
Short Stories for Students, volume(s) 6:320-44
Reference Guide to Short Fiction (St. James Press, an imprint of Gale), volume(s) 2:1085-6



The Master of Short Forms

"The Master of Short Forms," in Garca Mrquez: The Man and His Work, The University of North Carolina Press, 1990,
pp. 11938.
[In the following excerpt, Bell-Villada asserts that "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" contains parodies of
typical fairy-tale characteristics that are commonly expected by the reader, such as the depiction of the winged stranger
as an angel. He also examines Garca Mrquez's comic but good-natured portrayal of his characters]
"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is subtitled "A Tale for Children," but what fairy-tale characteristics it has
are affectionately parodied throughout. On one hand, there is unmistakable magic in the arrival of the winged
humanoid, the apparent angel who seems to have crash-landed in the courtyard of Pelayo and Elisenda, a modest rural
couple living in a coastal village. On the other hand, everything about the visitor completely contradicts our standard,
mythified, Western image of God's angels. Rather than stereotypically young, heroic-looking, and blond, with sumptuous
garments and wings all in white, Garca Mrquez's mysterious stranger is dressed in rags, is nearly bald and toothless,
and has soiled "buzzard wings" strewn with parasites. His being temporarily lodged in the chicken coop further detracts
from the dignity we normally expect of otherworldly creatures.
At the same time the official emissaries of the Catholic faith show their comic limitations. Father Gonzaga may bear the
name of a legendary Jesuit saint and hero, and indeed he is a robust former woodcutter, but his expectation that the
angel should know Latin as "the language of God" demonstrates his innocence of scriptural Hebrew and Greek.
Meanwhile, in perfect medieval fashion, the learned argufiers in Rome debate endlessly as to whether the man in
question possesses a navel or speaks Aramaic (the language Jesus probably spoke), and they even ask how many times
that old Scholastic chestnutthe stranded angel could fit on the head of a pin! (The simplest solution, of course, would
be for the churchmen to betake themselves to the Caribbean village and use the evidence of their eyes and ears; but their
Scholastic doctrine has yet to catch up with the empirical method.) Still, it cannot be denied that the visitor has the
divine capacity to perform miracles, however skewed they besuch as giving a blind man three new teeth or having
sunflowers sprout on a leper's sores. Perhaps they are practical jokes he plays on the gawking townspeople.
For the ordinary folk in this storytheir notions as well as their ailmentscome across as equally comical: the rustic
who thinks the angel should be "mayor of the world," or the invalid woman who counts her heartbeats, or the
Portuguese man disturbed by the noises of the stars. Garca Mrquez's humor with his fictive villagers, it should be
noted, is mostly gentle and good-natured. The only dark moment comes toward the end, when Pelayo and Elisenda,
having gotten rich from exhibiting "their" angel, now build a mansion, and she wears satin shoes and fine silks. In the
meantime the very source of their wealth is shooed around and out of the house by Elisenda with her broom, to be
finally consigned to the shed. His wings are healing, however, and one spring day he flies off just as Elisenda is peeling
onions (the same effect of Fernanda's sheets in One Hundred Years), and the onetime moneymaker-turned-nuisance
recedes as "a dot on the horizon of the sea" before he disappears for good. Without demonstrating the aggressive satire
of Luis Buuel in movies such as Simon of the Desert or The Milky Way, Garca Mrquez shares in the great Spanish film
director's laughing sensibility....

Source Citation:
Bell-Villada, Gene H. "The Master of Short Forms." EXPLORING Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student
Resource Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 16 Feb. 2007



Overview of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
[A freelance writer and copyeditor, Faulkner is pursuing an MA in English at Wayne State University. In the following
essay, he explores the peculiar effects of magic realism as a literary style employed in "A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings." ]
The style of writing called "magic realism" is marked by its imaginative content, vivid effects, and lingering mystery. In
combining fantastic elements with realistic details, a writer like Garca Mrquez can create a fictional "world" where the
miraculous and the everyday live side-by-sidewhere fact and illusion, science and folklore, history and dream, seem
equally "real," and are often hard to distinguish. The form clearly allows writers to stretch the limits of possibility, and to
be richly inventive; however, it involves more than the creation of attractive fantasies. The village in "A Very Old Man
with Enormous Wings" may be appealing in some ways, but it is also a complex, difficult, even disturbing fantasy.
Beyond imagination, the successful creation of such a world in the reader's mind requires skillful use of the same tools
and techniques familiar in more conventional, less "magical" types of fiction.
In the character of the "bird-man," we can see this style at work, and experience the charming (but unsettling) effect it
often has on readers. His mysterious nature is the story's central "problem," the source of its energy and tension. We
know, of course, that human beings don't have wings; "logically," such a character must be either a monster or a
miracleif he exists at all. Yet when the doctor examines the old man, what most impresses him is "the logic of his
wings," which "seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn't understand why other men didn't
have them too." Logic and science insist that such a creature must be supernatural, but Garca Mrquez presents him as
entirely "natural"; much like the doctor, once we've "seen" him, it's as if winged old men were common, even
unremarkable, visitors. We see how, despite "the inconvenience of the wings," Pelayo and Elisenda "very soon overcame
their surprise and in the end found him familiar." As readers, we are guided to the same kind of acceptance. No one
questions the old man's existence, or the reality of his wings, not even the narrator (except, perhaps, in the final line,
when the old man becomes "an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea"). He may or may not be an angel, but he is
unquestionably an old man with wings, as "real" as anyone else in the story.
Several techniques contribute to the old man's vivid "existence." Detailed sensory imagery is a standard means for
writers to reinforce a character's "reality" to the reader, and Garca Mrquez not only makes us "see" the old man (right
down to the "few faded hairs left on his bald skull" and the parasites picking through his ruined feathers), but also
"smell" him, "feel" the texture of his wings, and "hear" his whistling heartbeat. The rich imagery also works to
undermine supernatural stereotypes, contradicting our usual ideas about angels and denying the old man any of the
heroic or exalted qualities we expect. He is described not only in human, earthly terms, but in terms of extreme weakness
and poverty ("dressed like a ragpicker," "his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather"). When he is compared to
birds, they are not exotic eagles or dazzling peacocks, but common species with less-than-noble reputations (his
"buzzard wings," "a decrepit hen," "a senile vulture"). As Father Gonzaga observes (and by the author's design),
"nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels." He thus becomes real the more we see him as human, a
creature closer to our own experience and understandingnot a shining, mythical being but a frail, suffering, even
pathetic fellow, who happens to have a few physical quirks.
The problem Garca Mrquez presents us is not just "What if angels were real?" but "What if they were real, and nothing
like we expect them to be?" He creates a tension between the old man's magical and human qualities, leaving us unable
to fit the character into a comfortable mental category. The old man is far too human and decrepit to match our cultural
image of angels: perfect, powerful, majestic, immortal. Nor does he appear to be a heavenly messenger, sent by God as a
sign of momentous changes; his presence seems to be purely an accident of the weather, without purpose or meaning.
Nonetheless, he certainly has his magical qualities, and is even credited with miracles (though, like everything else about
him, they are disturbing, and fail to satisfy expectations). However miraculous his nature, origins, or abilities may be, he
is stranded here, and relatively powerlessan exile from his former life, at the mercy of strangers. The villagers must
somehow account for him, and because no one understands his language, he is unable (and apparently unwilling) to
explain himself. Several possible interpretations arise, but most of them are clearly absurd, telling us more about the
villagers' superstitions and beliefs than about the old man's "true nature." They are rendered with playful humor,


ensuring that the reader will appreciate the irrational and illusory basis of such "folk wisdom." Yet our "superior,"
conventional methods of logic and reason don't seem any more useful in reaching a secure explanation. The old man
remains a stubborn, intriguing mystery, both magical and ordinary, impossible to decipher but undeniably there.
This uncertainty (or ambiguity) applies not just to the old man, but evidently to life itself, as it is lived in this timeless,
nameless village. It seems to be a place where just about anything can happen (for example, a young woman can be
changed into a spider for disobeying her parents)or at least, it is a place where everyone is quite willing to believe such
things happen, and to act as though they do happen. This impression is partly a result of Garca Mrquez's use of
narrative voice. For the most part, the story seems to be told by the standard "omniscient observer" of third-person
fictiona narrator who knows all the necessary facts, and can be trusted to present them reliably. When such narration
expresses an opinion, the reader tends to accept it as a correct interpretation. This narrator may seem to fit the type at
first, but later appears to change his point of view, and even his opinions of events. The narrator seems to endorse the
villagers' thinking at times (for example, reporting without comment that the old man has a "strong sailor's voice," even
though we have no evidence for this assumption of Pelayo and Elisenda's), but at other times, he seems almost
contemptuous of their irrational ideas. (A few lines later, when he describes how the couple "skipped over the
inconvenience of the wings" and "quite intelligently" decided that he was nothing but a sailor, the intent seems to be
strongly sarcastic.) We might entertain hope that Father Gonzaga's correspondence with church leaders will eventually
produce an explanationuntil the narrator comments that those "meager letters might have come and gone until the
end of time" without result. In such ways, readers come to rely on the narrator for clues about "how to take" elements in
the story that may be unclear. But this narrator seems determined to be untrustworthy, and leaves us uncertain about
important events. Without telling us how, he treats everything that happens as though it "makes sense." Though he is
habitually ironic in his view of the "wise" villagers' beliefs, he describes the supernatural experience of the "spider-
woman" in simple factual terms, seeming to accept it as readily as his characters do. Are we to conclude that this
fantastic transformation from human to spider actually happened? Or that the narrator is now as deluded as the
villagers? Or even that he is purposely lying to us? At such moments, the narration seems to parody the style of
traditional fairy tales; as the label "magic realism" suggests, some elements of the story seem meant to be approached
with the simplistic "logic" of fantasy, while others are depicted with all the complexity and imperfection that mark "real
life."
Garca Mrquez not only combines realistic details with fantastic ones, but seems to give them both equal weight, an
equal claim to "reality" or "truth" in the reader's mind. Dreamlike, poetic descriptions are presented matter-of-factly; like
winged old men who fall from the sky, they are treated more as everyday realities than as bizarre impossibilities. When
we learn that a character is deprived of sleep "because the noise of the stars disturbed him," it seems to be merely a
symptom quoted from his medical chart, perhaps even a common cause of insomnia, not an obvious delusion or a feat
of supernatural hearing. As in the similar case of the "poor woman who since childhood had been counting her
heartbeats and had run out of numbers," the narrator gives no indication that any particular explanation is required,
almost assuming that the reader will accept these odd riddles without question. Traditionally, we aren't meant to take
such language literally (as a description of factual events), but poetically (or figuratively), as a creative key to some idea or
state of mind, which we must interpret for ourselves. (The insomniac, for example, might be said to "really" be
experiencing hallucinations due to mental illness, or perhaps a feeling of isolation and insignificance in the cosmosbut
not actually listening to stars.) But here, such "magical" descriptions seem to be offered as straightforward accounts of
"normal" (if rare and unusual) occurrences (his ears are sensitive, and those stars are just too loud!)events whose "real
meaning" need not, or cannot, be determined, but which must nonetheless be accepted as "real."
The mixture of different kinds of imagery, and different narrative attitudes, serves to heighten the reader's uncertainty.
Realistic and magical descriptions are often combined, as if they are inseparable aspects of the same events. Thus, we are
not only told that it is "the third day of rain," but also, a few lines later, that "[t]he world had been sad since Tuesday."
By combining factual and imaginative descriptions, and seeming to treat them with equal credibility, the author suggests
that both "ways of knowing" are valid, perhaps even necessary to achieving a balanced understanding. Magic seems to lie
just beneath the surface of the story, waiting to break through, almost beyond the narrator's control. For example, a
description of the old man's undignified captivity lingers over factual, everyday details (his diet of eggplant mush, the
crowd tossing stones to get him to react, the hens pecking through his feathers); but the insects infesting his wings are
suddenly described as "stellar parasites"a poetic image, not a "factual" one (at least until there is any evidence of
insects living on stars). If we approach the story expecting to be charmed by a fairy tale, the factual descriptions seem


"too real;" they spoil the "magical" effect we hope for, by allowing the unpleasant and inconvenient details of everyday
life to intrude on our imaginative landscape. But if we read with a "realistic" frame of mind, looking for solid facts and
logical explanations, the strange poetic images only frustrate us, and may cause us to question other apparent "facts."
The magical touches may dazzle us, but they can also make us feel like the old man in his early efforts to fly: that we are
"slipp[ing] on the light," unable to "get a grip on the air." We must somehow accept the events our narrator presents (at
least temporarily), in order to continue reading at all, and have any hope of making sense of the tale. But we are never
sure whether to "accept" them as real events, mass hallucinations, symbolic stand-ins for some "other" story the author
has in mind, or the unreal "magic" of legends and fairy tales. We cannot choose between reality and magic; Garca
Mrquez insists on giving us both, even in the most minor details. When the startled bird-man suddenly flaps his wings,
he creates a "whirlwind" in the courtyard, with a dust cloud composed of both (earthly) chicken dung and (heavenly)
"lunar dust:" even the dirt on the ground is shown to be both humble and marvelous at once.
Typical of the style, this story's tone seems both playful and serious. The striking images and sudden surprises stimulate
the reader's senses and imagination, but also frustrate and complicate our efforts to fix a definite meaning to events.
Works of magic realism are both praised and criticized for their "childlike wonder," their depiction of a world of almost-
infinite possibilities, where the supernatural and the everyday take on the same vivid intensity. But they are not fairy tales
or two-dimensional fantasies; they offer no clear lessons, simple events, or sharp distinctions between reality and magic.
"Wondering" includes both delight and confusion, the struggle to comprehend experiences that challenge our
understanding, and don't fit our accustomed map of reality. Far more things are possible in the world of magic realism,
including miracles, contradictions, and logical impossibilitiesbut this also means that more meanings are possible, and
that all meanings will be elusive and uncertain.

Source Citation:
Faulkner, Tom. "Overview of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." EXPLORING Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit:
Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 16 Feb. 2007



The Logic of Wings: Garca Mrquez, Todorov, and the Endless
Resources of Fantasy
"The Logic of Wings: Garca Mrquez, Todorov, and the Endless Resources of Fantasy," in Bridges to Fantasy, George E.
Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, eds., Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, pp. 12129.
[In the following excerpt, Gerlach examines "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" as a fantasy, in which Garca
Mrquez employs language, similes, and satire to both destroy and evoke an appropriate reaction to a mythic subject.
Gerlach also offers his interpretation of the role of the narrator, asserting that the narrator uses two levels of distortion
to contrast the human folly of the villagers with the more desirable traits (such as patience) of the old man. ]
Is fantasy dependent on certain themes, and, if so, might these themes be exhausted? My own response to one story,
Gabriel Garca Mrquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," a story in which theme and the atmosphere of a
fantasy that emerges from the theme are, if anything, negatively correlated, leads me to suspect that fantasy is not closely
tied to theme, so that fantasies may be created in any age, without reference to theme.
The story might best be described by starting at the end. At the conclusion, an old man flaps like a senile vulture away
from the village where for years he has been held captive. The woman who has grudgingly taken care of him watches
him open a furrow in the vegetable patch with his fingernails in his first attempt to rise. She sees him nearly knock down
a shed with his "ungainly flapping." As he gains altitude and begins to disappear, she watches "until it was no longer
possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot." George
McMurray, in his recent study of Gabriel Garca Mrquez [ Gabriel Garca Mrquez, 1977], focuses on this final image and
concludes that for the reader (and the villagers) the story is a "cathartic destruction of antiquated myths." My own
reaction was quite different: I had the prescribed catharsis, but I came away with my taste for myth and the supernatural
intact. I could see how McMurray arrived at his conclusion, because this particular Icarus, with his "few faded hairs left
on his bald skull" and the air of a "drenched great-grandfather," would hardly seem to inspire wonder. But I felt as if I
had witnessed the beginning of a myth, not its end, and the story had evoked for me the sense of wonder and marvel
that one associates with myth at its inception.
Whether the story is best designated as a myth or as a fantasy is another matter. Myths present "supernatural episodes as
a means of interpreting natural events in an effort to make concrete and particular a special perception of man or a
cosmic view," as [C. Hugh Holman, in his 1972] A Handbook to Literature would have it. The old man of Garca
Mrquez's story does not stimulate the villagers to interpret anything. He is dropped into their existence unexplained,
and leaves unexplained, clarifying nothing. It would be more accurate to consider the work a fantasy on the grounds that
the story deals, to use the handbook's terms again, with an "incredible and unreal character." I will eventually apply a
more contemporary definition of fantasy to the story, [Tzvetan] Todorov's definition [in The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, 1973], but for the moment I prefer to pursue further the
consequences of McMurray's approach. His view implies that the subject of myth, or, as I will have it, fantasy,
determines our reactions. If the text parodies a mythic subject, then the reader would appropriately respond, not with an
elevated sense of wonder, but with amusement at the exposure of nonsense. Since the subject matter in Garca
Mrquez's story does not diminish my own appreciation of the marvelous, I am left to conclude either that McMurray
has misread the text or that the effect of a fantasy is not dependent on the subject. I have concluded that both
propositions are true. McMurray has misrepresented the text, and, even so, something other than theme or subject
matter creates what the reader responds to in a fantasy. "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" can be used to show
that, as Todorov has predicted, the manner of telling, not the matter, creates the fantasy.
McMurray's points should first be dealt with in more detail. His interpretation is brief, but his argument is easily
extended. Part of Garca Mrquez's strategy, as McMurray suggests, was undeniably to diminish the grandeur of this
unearthly winged creature. Similes used to describe him do not even grant him human attributes: matched with the
villagers who stood around his cage he looked "like a huge decrepit hen among fascinated chickens." Later it is said that
he tolerates a child's "ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions." A complex simile, to be sure,


for the narrator is saying not only that the old man is like a dog, but also that the dog with his patience and lack of
illusions is like a human being. Nevertheless, the effect of the simile is to emphasize the analogy to an animal. The syntax
of the sentence which reveals the old man's wings also diminishes rather than ennobles him. Pelayo, the man who found
him, heard something moving and groaning in the courtyard that he had recently cleaned of crabs and the stench they
left behind. Pelayo "had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who,
in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings." The long sentence, with its
hesitations that duplicate in the reader the efforts of the old man, relegates the marvel of his wings to the terminal
subordinate clause. Rhetorical decisions such as these have just as much effect on us as the content. It would seem that
both the language and the content are pushing the reader in the direction that McMurray has outlined. The supernatural
is described as something ordinary or, even more precisely, foul and repellent.
McMurray's analysis can be extended further. The narrator's motive in telling the story would seem to be satiric rather
than inspirational. The credulity of mankind and greedPelayo's wife begins to charge admission to see the old man
are apparently the narrator's targets. The church is too, for the attempts of ecclesiastical bureaucrats to discover through
correspondence with the resident priest whether or not the winged creature is an angel are bogged down by their desire
to find out "if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on
the head of a pin, or whether he wasn't just a Norwegian with wings." Furthermore, the narrator's exaggerated manner
of description seems to undercut even further our response to the old man. When Pelayo and his wife Elisenda first
speak to the old man, "he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor's voice." What it is that makes the
voice sound like that of a sailor is not questioned by the narrator, who simply mirrors what is presumably the illogic of
Pelayo and Elisenda. The narrator's complicity in this fabrication extends beyond mirroring. He notes that Pelayo and
Elisenda "skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway."
Since wings are certainly more than an "inconvenience," and the logical processes of Pelayo and Elisenda are therefore
something less than intelligent, we have a narrator who, instead of striving to establish the credibility of this supernatural
creature, is emphasizing the credulity of the villagers.
Similes that demean, satire, playful logicit would seem that Garca Mrquez is not about to honor a myth. Yet none of
these devices totally cancels out the mystery. The diminishing suggested by these devices does not represent all of the
truth about the old man and his wings. However decrepit the old man is, he does renew himself. When he arrived he
seemed close to death, and several years later a doctor listening to the old man's heart concludes that it is impossible for
him to be alive; yet after his release from his cage and with the onset of sunny days, stiff feathers begin to grow on his
wings. Although the narrator continues to denigrate, calling the new growth "scarecrow feathers" that look like "another
misfortune of decrepitude," the feathers do allow the old man to fly away. Something about the old man is greater than
the narrator's estimation of him.
Other devices that the narrator used to increase rather than decrease our respect for the old man also need to be
considered. When compared to those around him the old man becomes the model of patience, trying the best he can to
"get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had
been placed along the wire." He refuses to eat the mothballs that one of the villagers thinks is the "food prescribed for
angels," and subsists on eggplant mush. If he is "befuddled," that term has ironic value, for it is those that regard him
who are confused.
Contrast with what seems to be even the sanest of mortals is illustrative. Father Gonzaga is the figure presented by the
narrator as the most sane. He is not, as his parishioners are, ready to make the old man the mayor of the world or a
"five-star general in order to win all wars," nor does he want to put him out to stud to create "a race of winged wise men
who could take charge of the universe." Father Gonzaga "had been a robust woodcutter" and so by implication is more
realistic. He soberly approaches the old man and says good morning in Latin. Father Gonzaga has "his first suspicion of
an imposter" when he saw that the old man "did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His
ministers," and it is at this point we realize that Father Gonzaga is the one who fails the test, not the old man. Father
Gonzaga notices that "seen close up" the old man "was much too human," and so the priest warns his parishioners not
to be taken in. In the light of Father Gonzaga's response, the comment that the old man is "too human" is particularly
telling. Gonzaga's rationalism obscures his realization that although the winged gentleman may not meet doctrinal
specifications, he still is miraculous. What begins to emerge is an image of the old man as someone possibly more
human and reasonable than members of the wingless species.


The winged man's humanity is underlined by a foil the narrator creates, a woman who has been changed into a spider.
Her presence distracts the villagers, and they cease to pay attention to the old man. Her exhibit costs less, and unlike the
old man, she talks about her affliction. Where the old man refused, she encourages responses, readily accepting meatballs
tossed into her mouth. There is nothing ambiguous or submerged about our perception of her. The old man's wings
were slowly revealed; we are told bluntly that this woman is "a frightful tarantula the size of a ram... with the head of a
sad maiden." Though the narrator does not exaggerate the catalogue of her strangeness, she is in fact more grotesque
than the old man.
The narrator's description of the villagers' response to her is familiar: once again the logic of the villagers is suspect; the
crowd regards her a spectacle full of "human truth," a "fearful lesson." The facts of the lesson, however, are these: a
lightning bolt of brimstone changed her form because she had been dancing all night without her parents' permission.
The narrator's indirect exposure of the triviality of what the crowd considers a basic truth alters our response to the old
man. We begin to admire more his silence and even his diet.
The way the villagers treat him is ultimately the best clue to how we should regard him. They poke, they prod, and at one
point they burn him with a branding iron. Up until this point pain itself has seemed unreal. Those with ailments who
come to be cured have only the most fanciful of afflictions, such as that of an old man "who couldn't sleep because the
noise of the stars disturbed him" and that of "a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and
had run out of numbers." But the old man with wings responds with true pain, ranting in his "hermetic language," tears
in his eyes, flapping his wings to create "a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust." The villagers take the old man as
no more than a creature of fiction, hence not subject to pain. They may not see the old man's humanity, but the reader
should.
What I hope is emerging is a more complete sense of the role of the narrator. His denigrations of the protagonist have
been systematic but not exclusive. He distorts by alternately exaggerating and understating. What could be called the
outer or secondary level of distortion is the product of the narrator's supposed sympathy with the viewpoint of the
villagers. This level, whose function is basically satiric, leads the narrator to call wings "inconvenient" or to exaggerate
the church's concern in terms of the medieval problem of calculating the number of angels on the head of a pin. The
narrator takes the viewpoint of the villagers themselves, pretending to be alternately detached or supportive, but
everywhere he exposes irrationality and superstition. Underneath this level, however, is another, an inner or primary level
of distortion, which grows from one central factthere is an old man with enormous wings. That conception embodies
even in its grammatical form a paradox in the contrast between "old" and "enormous," for we would not expect
anything so powerfully endowed to be so decrepit. Beyond this paradox is a kind of simplicity and unarguable solidity.
The nature of the wings themselves does not change; what changes is our perception of their naturalness. By the end of
the story, a doctor examines the old man and is surprised by "the logic of his wings," and the reader is prepared for a
similar realization. These wings, as the doctor puts it, seem "so natural on that completely human organism that he
couldn't understand why other men didn't have them too." This old man, with his muteness, his patience, is in some
ways more human, more natural, and even more believable, than anyone else in the story. The secondary level of
distortion playfully exposes human folly; the primary level by contrast defines more desirable human traits.
At this point it is appropriate to define the genre of the work more precisely. The definition will allow us to see how the
two levels of distortion work together to create the effects we associate with fantasy. Within the last few years, several
critics, in particular W. R. Irwin [The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy, 1976], Eric S. Rabkin [The Fantastic in
Literature, 1976], and Tzvetan Todorov, have attempted to describe fantasy as a genre. Of the three, Todorov's analysis
provides the most instructive standards to apply to Garca Mrquez's story. The fit is not perfect; Todorov, I believe,
concludes that "fantasy" narrowly defined is hardly being written anymore. But even the divergence between "A Very
Old Man with Enormous Wings" and Todorov's principles is in itself enlightening.
Todorov assumes that, first, fantasies produce the effect of hesitation. The reader is never wholly sure whether he is
confronting a supernatural event or something that can be rationally explained. If the reader is able to conclude the
event is explicable solely on the supernatural level, the story belongs to another genre, the marvelous, and, if the reader
chooses the rational explanation, the story falls into the genre of the "uncanny." Second, the reader usually participates in
the story through the medium of a character who believes in reason and order, so that the reader experiences the


hesitation through the character's eyes. Third, the reader must not be able to explain away the supernatural events by
considering them allegorical or poetic. In this case the reader would conclude that the supernatural is merely a shorthand
for an idea, hence not to be taken literally. One of the clues to allegory is that no one in the story takes an aberration to
be unusual, and so there is no sense of hesitation.
In the case of the Garca Mrquez story, it is simpler to deal with the second point first. There is no character recounting
for us his experiences. There is an implied narrator, and this narrator is a direct inversion of the sort of character that
Todorov has posited. This is no rational human, but a creator of exaggerations. The hesitation that Todorov speaks of as
his first point, then, derives in this story not from the doubts of a character, but from our doubts about what the
narrator is saying. Todorov's analysis allows us to see the ingenuity of what Garca Mrquez has done. Garca Mrquez
has taken what would normally be the index of normality, the village folk, and made them the greatest of exaggerators.
The unreal character, in contrast, begins to appear normal and harmless. Garca Mrquez has managed to make his
central contrary-to-fact situation, the old man with wings (what I have been calling the primary level of distortion),
seems altogether more rational and ordinary than the villagers. Those who follow Rabkin's definition of fantasy should
be pleased, for the effect that I have described is replete with what Rabkin calls 180-degree turns in perspective, the
undermining of established expectations. As for the matter of allegory, it is possible that the wings themselves might be
taken as allegorical evidence of the true dignity of man. What prevents us from taking the wings as allegory is the very
insistence on the decrepitude of the old man, and elaboration of the reality of the wings, the "stellar parasites" in them.
In the same way, the characters both are and are not taking the old man as unusual, so that the wings both are and are
not allegorical. It is not that Garca Mrquez is making hash of Todorov's categories. What he is doing by his
exaggerations is creating the maximum doubt and hesitation about not only the supernatural but the natural as well.
We should now be able to reconsider some of the questions originally raised by McMurray's interpretation. Although it
might be possible to contend that McMurray's reading of the text failed to take into account the double role of the
narrator and the two levels of distortion, and hence he did not see the extent to which Garca Mrquez has shifted our
sympathies toward the old man and located the antiquated, exhausted view in the perception of the villagers, such a view
does not fully account for the energy of the story. Arriving at the truth of the story and feeling its impact do not
automatically result from peeling off the secondary layer of distortion and getting at the primary. It is not possible to
take either level as the ultimate truth. The positive values may seem to be vested in the primary level, for Garca Mrquez
has made muteness and patience seem truly supernatural virtues, and by implication exaggeration the expression of
human fallibility. But the center of the story is still an exaggeration. Men do not have wings. The process of distortion
itself is the vehicle of our approach to the story. The very act of reading and interpreting the story rests not on muteness
and patience, but on the appreciation of exaggeration. In reading the story the reader does not respond only to the truth
of a particular idea, in the case of this story, for instance, the idea that there is an indestructible, winged aspect of man
that can fly despite its own aging or the lack of appreciation from ordinary men. The story is a whole, not a set of levels,
and what causes the reader to respond, in the terms that Todorov has established, is the reader's hesitation over what is
real.
This hesitation is built up from the minutest details, as can be shown in one isolated segment, the ending. Even slight
distortions in language are significant. The concluding phrase states that the old man "was no longer an annoyance in
[Elisenda's] life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea." The antithesis of "annoyance" and "dot," contrasting an
abstraction with something at least barely visible, might make us grammatically uncomfortable, but the mismatch
reproduces the quality of the story itself. It is as if there were a rather easy flow between our feelings and the things we
find about us, so that a thought might suddenly take a substance as real as our own, or just as suddenly disappear. The
energy created by unusual phrases works in the same way. The idea of modifying "dot" by the adjective "imaginary" is
plausible in that the dot may be so small that it is nearly imaginary, but the conjunction of the two terms is also
implausible; it has something of the force of an oxymoron, for Elisenda is simultaneously seeing and merely imagining.
"Imaginary" is also apt in that the old man is by our standards rightly considered imaginary. Structurally the close is
effective because it complements the openingthe character was visually constructed piece by piece for us, and now
visually recedes into nothingness. Viewed from one perspective, humankind is relieved of a burden. Viewed from
another, a creature more perfect, more logical than man has achieved his freedom. The fact that the old man has escaped
from the perspective of the characters means to the characters that he does not exist, he may be ignored. But we have
seen him endure over a period of time and can imagine him perhaps going back to whatever imaginary place it is that he
lives in, one that has as much validity to it as this imaginary town into which he has fallen.


The cluster of possibilities here matches the possibilities advanced in the rest of the story. Clusters such as this give the
story its power and create the effects we identify with fantasy; the clusters work much the same way as the hesitation
over the natural and the supernatural. Because the effect of the story, the sense in which it is a fantasy, is created by the
treatment, not by the subject or theme, the number of fantasies that can still be written should be endless. At one time
myths may have been man's way of imagining the unimaginable, but now, even though literal mythmaking is no longer
used to explain the world around us, the sense of wonder that myth brings with it need not in consequence be
abandoned. It does not matter that we cannot take the fanciful as literally as man might once have, nor does it matter
that the subject of a myth is decrepit, toothless, and featherless. The sense of wonder that a myth or a fantasy evokes
inheres not in the subject, but in the telling. Fantasy is more the how than the what.
Put in terms of Todorov's discussion, fantasy is created initially by something significantly contrary to the ordinary. The
task of the reader is to naturalize, to recuperate, that is, to make intelligible, this break from the norms of the reader's
experience. The most significant thing about the genre is that the break should not readily be bridged; the circuits must
be kept open as long as possible. In Todorov's words, the hesitation must continue. What the reader ends up
recuperating is ultimately the process, the broken circuit itself. It is not what the break is about, it is that there is a
continuous break that makes a fantasy. Since fantasy is a process, not a result, its resources are endless, and it is in no
way dependent on the fashion of the conventions it adapts.
The final matter to consider is the effect of parody in the genre. Does the parody of a myth or fantasy make the story a
last gasp, as the Russian formalists have asserted in other cases, of a genre that is about to expire or assume a new form?
I think not. Parody is not central to this story. The mention of stellar bugs and scratchings is only a way for the narrator
to make the mystery of the old man more, not less, incredible. There are parodic elements, but this is not a parody as
such. What one ultimately grasps in a fantasy is the potential of language to construct a world partly, but not wholly, like
our own. Fantasy is the logical extension, the wings, of language itself. Literature in general and fantasy in particular are
the magic which our customary language so dimly represents.

Source Citation:
Gerlach, John. "The Logic of Wings: Garca Mrquez, Todorov, and the Endless Resources of Fantasy." EXPLORING
Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH
SCHOOL. 16 Feb. 2007 HYPERLINK
"http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.do?&contentSet=GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=SRC-
1&docId=EJ2112200428&source=gale&srcprod=SRCG&userGroupName=tlc139095056&version=1.0"
http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.do?&contentSet=GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=SRC-
1&docId=EJ2112200428&source=gale&srcprod=SRCG&userGroupName=tlc139095056&version=1.0

>.



Student Notes: The Destructors



Graham Greene

"Graham Greene," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930-1959, edited by Bernard Oldsey,
Gale Research Company, 1983, pp. 146-69.
[In the following essay, Costa surveys Greene's career, focusing on his novels.]
Graham Greene is a writer who, like Fedor Dostoevski, has lived his life under the torment of faith. When the priestly
Alyosha Karamazov kisses his brother, the skeptical Ivan, at the end of the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers
Karamazov, Dostoevski mediated, in Ivan'sand in his ownsearch for meaning, in favor of God. In his world, in
which evil dominates, Greene takes a good-bad man and puts him in a situation where his potentials for evil and good
inevitably collide, where what is at stake transcends integrity. If the character is really good while seeming bad, nothing
will serve him better than his vulnerability. Greene paves hell with heavenly intimations until, finally, innocencethat is,
freedom from a controlling guile or cunningtakes over everything, even corruption, and a state that Greene calls grace
is reached. In Greene's major novels, the protagonist's fall is always fortunate because it strips him of everything,
including his disguises: bad Catholic (Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, 1948), bad writer (Bendrix in The End of the Affair,
1951), drunken diplomat (Brown in The Comedians, 1966), flawed clergyman (the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory,
1940), inept idealist (Pyle in The Quiet American, 1955). Always in the wings, urging the character on, is a figure he will
have to discern on his own, a figure called, for want of a better name, God.
God, in fact, hardly enters Greene's fiction until A Gun for Sale (1936), when the killer Raven, trapped by a betrayal,
reaches out for a God he does not believe in. Later, action is allegorized in God's image, as in The Power and the Glory. The
journal entries of Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair show her infidelity with Bendrix pitted against God's will in such a
way as to make God an actual character. Consistently, in the key works, Greene uses God as a kind of reference. What
happens over and over in Greene is like something that occurs perhaps once in Ernest Hemingway's worknear the
end of The Sun Also Rises. When Brett Ashley informs Jake Barnes that deciding not to be a bitch is "sort of what we
have instead of God," Jakes replies, "Some people have God ... quite a lot." It is usually that way in Greene's religious
novels, God either honored in the breach or dishonored in the observance.
During his earliest period, Greene dealt often, in both his long and his short fiction, with the initiation of a youngster
into the adult world, that is, the transformation by experiences which can sometimes prove cruel and disillusioning.
Later, in his three most deeply and problematically "religious" novels, Greene depicts rites of passage in such a way that
good and evil are indistinguishable. Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1938) believes the only way to survive is to rewrite the golden
rule: cause pain to everyone lest they inflict it on you. The whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory finds companionship
among criminals that was unknown to him when the pious came kissing his hand. Major Scobie in The Heart of the Matter
is corrupted by pity. Greene is the supreme exemplar in twentieth-century fiction of the guilt-obsessed writer who has
worked through corruption-of-innocence so thoroughly that he has brought it out on its other side as innocence-of-
corruption.
Graham Greene was born 2 October 1904 at Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, England, to Charles Henry Greene,
headmaster of Berkhamstead School, and Marion R. Greene. He was one of six children. The parents were cousins, both
born with the family name Greene, and Robert Louis Stevenson was a first cousin of Marion Greene's.
Greene entered Berkhamstead School in 1915 and left in 1921, when he was seventeen. He shares with a distinguished
list of upper-middle-class English writers of his generation, such as George Orwell, Robert Graves, and Malcolm Lowry,
the intense nostalgia for schooldays which they hated and, therefore, love to recall. Berkhamstead School was the place
where evil became an article of faith, "a land of stone stairs and cracked bells ringing early [where] one was aware of fear
and hate.... One met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of
evil.... And so faith came to oneshapelessly, without dogma, a presence about a croquet lawn, something associated
with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell, but for a long


time it was only hell one could picture with a certain intimacy." This sense of hell as more credible than heaven is
another way of saying that corruption acquired innocence. It would be a theme the writer would never tire of playing on.
His early reading had been in Anthony Hope, Rider Haggard, andcruciallyMarjorie Bowen's The Viper of Milan. He
has written: "Imitation after imitation of Miss Bowen's magnificent novel went into the exercise books ... marked with
enormous brutality and a despairing romanticism.... Religion might later explain it to me in other terms, but the pattern
was already thereperfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again."
But perfection for Greene is the property neither of good nor evil, innocence nor corruption. In his fiction the world is
always under siege. "It was the fusion of the morbid and the sentimental," declares David Pryce-Jones, likening Greene's
novelistic landscape to perpetual war, "a matter of watching the familiar, the old, the safe being transformed or adapted
or blown to bits." It is not surprising, then, that, in a writer for whom adolescence lay like a dread palimpsest over
everything, stories whose protagonists are boys should trace in capsule the interweaving of innocence and corruption.
Written nearly twenty years apart, "The Basement Room" (1936) and "The Destructors" (1954) are parables of
goodness subverted.
By reversing every assumed value, the later story, "The Destructors," flips innocence into an unaccustomed controlling
position over corruption. Time and placethe World War II blitzkrieg of Londonare ripe for it, and Greene makes
the most of his opportunity. Philip Lane has grown to early teens as Trevor, son of a patrician family reduced by the war
to neighborhood caste. Trevor joins the Wormsley Common Gang who know him only as "T." He takes over the gang
by audacity, making it clear there is to be no more kids' stuffpetty thievery or cadging rides from unwary conductors.
Instead, they will systematically demolish the common's last standing buildings, a house and loo belonging to an elderly
man who has offered them chocolates, a gesture they view as a bribe. They dub Thomas, the householder, "Old Misery."
They work, Greene writes, "with the seriousness of creatorsand destruction after all is a form of creation." They will
dismantle Old Misery's house, with its 200-year-old corkscrew staircase, from the inside, bring down to their level a
building that, to Trevor, is invisibly held up "by opposite forces."
Opposite forces generate, as they do all of Greene's longer works, this shorter one which leads off a list of Greene's own
favorites ("I believe I have never written anything better"). T. and his gang dispossess the old man, but they are not
thieves; they burn his seventy bank notes one by one. T. admits to wanting "to see Old Misery's face when we're
through," but he denies hating him. "There'd be no fun if I hated him." For Trevor, hate and loveopposing forces
are "soft ... hooey. There's only things."
They maneuver Thomas into his own loo, then lock the door behind him. While they put finishing touches on the
demolition, he, half suspecting, ponders the Bank Holiday and an unfavorable horoscope ("They speak in parables and
double meanings"). The gang makes him "comfortable" by passing in a blanket and throwing buttered penny buns and
sausage rolls over his wall. Early next morning, a driver starts the lorry that he has parked by Mr. Thomas's house. The
lorry, having been tied to a strut of the house, completes Trevor's fiendish achievement. The driver, even in the face of
Old Misery's misery, breaks into convulsive laughteropposing forces at work to the end: "Nothing personal, but you
got to admit that it's funny." "The Destructors," like "The Basement Room," is about youth at bay. In the first,
goodness loses out to forces it cannot understand; in the second, to forces it understands all too well. Innocence and
depravityopposing forceshave joined hands.
There is something compelling about authors who travel to exotic places for their materials, make wars or revolutions
vital parts of the action, and install heroes who somehow perform honorably despite a paralysis of spirit. Where the
Ernest Hemingway hero comes out of early crucibles purged of all posturing except the ultimate posture of never
showing the scars or talking about how he got them, the Greene hero records his daily grappling with the demons of a
"despairing romanticism" that is associated with boredom.
Greene wonders "how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the
melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation." One wonders how close his situation, up to the age
of thirty, brought him to despair, so conventional was it. After graduation from Berkhamstead School, he read modern
history at Balliol College, Oxford. While there, as a perverse prank, he joined the Communist party as a dues-paying


memberthe amount he paid has been estimated at twenty-eight centsfor a period variously reported as from four to
six weeks. That caprice would haunt Greene thirty years later.
Greene, a lifelong socialist, has always been fairly consistently pro-Marxist: supporting Charlie Chaplin, favoring Fidel
Castro, and saying if it came to a choice he would rather live in the Soviet Union than in America. His later friendship
with the ultra-conservative Evelyn Waugh, although largely founded on their shared religion, often stood poised in
uneasy truce. Waugh regarded socialism as the root of most modern heresy, and Greene resented the conservatism of
Catholic custom and fashion. Despite these differences, neither novelist found any temptation to doubt the doctrine of
the fall.
He took a second-class degree at Oxford in 1925, and in that year his first book was published, a collection of poetry,
Babbling April, which critics saw as imitative. Greene does not include any poems in his collected edition. Engagement
and an initially happy marriage to a Catholic, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, in 1927 followed his conversion to the Church of
Rome in 1926, but even though he would be known as a "Catholic writer," so notable an event as his conversion resists,
in Greene's retelling, even a semblance of drama: "The cathedral [in Nottingham] was a dark place full of inferior statues.
I was baptised one foggy afternoon about four o'clock. I couldn't think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my
old name.... It was all very quickly and formally done, while someone at a children's service muttered in another chapel.
Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea.... It was like a life photographed as it came to mind, without any
other, full of gaps, giving at best a general impression."
In the decade following his conversion Greene worked initially as a literary journalist and then as an editor on the Times,
a job he relinquished only after the publication of his first novel, The Man Within (1929), and the guarantee from
Heinemann and Doubleday of a [600-pounds-sterling] advance. The title of the book comes from Sir Thomas Browne's
epigraph, "There's another man within me that's angry with me." Pryce-Jones notes that significantly the work contains
many of the characteristic themes Greene was to work out later. Andrews is a foreshadowing of Greene's early heroes, a
young man dogged by recollections of a desperate childhood and a brutal father, a smuggler disguised as a London
businessman. To wreak vengeance on his father for his own lost innocence, Andrews anonymously informs to the
excisemen about the smugglers. When the smugglers are acquitted in court despite Andrews's defiant testimony, they
revenge themselves on the woman he loves. Her death by suicide is the final in a book-long series of betrayals. Andrews
gives himself up to the police as her murderer. His fate looks ahead to that of Greene's perhaps prototypical betrayer-
penitent, Scobie of The Heart of the Matter, a book that came two decades later. The Man Within was a modest success,
selling 8,000 copies.

Source Citation:
Costa, Richard Hauer. "Graham Greene." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center -
Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007

Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 29:204-09, 212-15, 217, 222



Student Notes: Miss Brill



Overview of Miss Brill

[Peltier is an English instructor at Trinity College and has published works of both fiction and nonfiction. In the
following essay, he provides a general overview of Mansfield's "Miss Brill." ]
Katherine Mansfield, born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, lived a short life, but
she established a literary reputation at a young age. Her first published book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911,
when she was only twentytwo years old. She became friends with some of the great literary figures of her day,
including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and married the writer and critic J. Middleton Murry.
Her stories are full of detail and small, albeit significant, incidents in her characters' lives. In an often-quoted letter
published in The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, she says of "Miss Brill": "I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit
her, and to fit her on that day at that moment." Katherine Fullbrook notes in her biography titled simply Katherine
Mansfield that "while the surface of her stories often flash with sparkling detail, the underlying tones are sombre,
threatening, and register the danger in the most innocent seeming aspects of life."
"Miss Brill," is one of her finest stories, capturing in a moment an event that will forever change the life of the title
character. Miss Brill is an older woman of indeterminate age who scrapes by teaching English to school children and
reading newspapers to an "old invalid gentleman." Her joy in life is her visits to the park on Sunday, where she observes
all that goes on around her and listens to the conversations of people nearby, as she sits "in other people's lives." It is
when she tries to leave her role as spectator and join the "players" in her little world that she is rebuffed by that world
and her fantasy falls apart.
On this particular Sunday, she has taken her fur necklet out of its box, brushed it, cleared its eyes, and put it on. She is
glad that she wore it, because the air contains a "faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip." It i s a
beautiful day, the first Sunday of the Season, so everything seems nicer than usual. Even the band seems to play "louder
and gayer."
Miss Brill is somewhat disappointed that there are only two older people near where she is seated. They do not speak,
and her observations of the life around her begin in silence. It is clear at this point in the story that she considers herself
a spectator, detached from the activities around her. She expects entertainment from the strollers and sitters, but she has
been disappointed more than once. Last week, we learn, an Englishman and his wife held a boring conversation which
drove Miss Brill to the point of wanting to shake the woman. But she didn't shake her, because that would have meant
involving herself in the actions she so quietly observed.
Mansfield's eye for detail and the telling moment exhibits itself here as we, along with Miss Brill, watch the activities in
the park: "... couples and groups [parade], [stop] to talk, to greet... children [run] among them, swooping and laughing."
A "high stepping mother" picks up her child who has "suddenly sat down `'flop.'" It is a scene made up of details that
we have all, at one time or another, witnessed ourselves. And that is all that Miss Brill does right now: witness the world
parading past her.
But then she takes note of the people on the benches. She sees "something funny about nearly all of them." And as she
looks at these "odd, silent, nearly all old" people who look as if they've "just come from dark little rooms or eveneven
cupboards!" she does not see that she is one of them. Mansfield's prose gives us an objective look at the people and
events around Miss Brill while at the same time allowing us to see the subjective interpretation Miss Brill makes of that
world. We don't know what she thinks of herself, or even if she thinks of herself at all. But if she does, she must not see
herself very clearly. She must not believe that she is old or odd or funny.


Now the band strikes up, and the procession continues with young girls and soldiers and peasant women leading
donkeys and a nun and a beautiful woman who drops her flowers and, when a little boy picks them up for her, throws
them away "as if they'd been poisoned." Miss Brill doesn't know "whether to admire that or not!"
Then an older woman wearing an ermine toque (a hat made of white fur) meets a man. The ermine is "shabby" and
bought when "her hair was yellow." Now her hair, as well as her face and "even her eyes" are as white as the fur. She
makes superficial, yet somehow strained and desperate conversation but the man walks away after lighting his cigarette
and blowing smoke in her face. The band plays more softly as the woman stands there, exposed and alone, but it picks
up the tempo and plays even more loudly than before after the woman has pretended to see someone and walks away.
The fur connects themher toque and Miss Brill's neckletand we see, as the woman is snubbed by the man, a
foreshadowing of what is to happen to Miss Brill later in the story. The woman tried to engage the man in conversation,
and Miss Brill will later try to engage with the world.
The pageant resumes with an "old man with long whiskers" nearly being knocked over by "four girls walking abreast."
Miss Brill is lost in her fantasy world now, thinking how wonderful it all is. She decides, suddenly, that it is "exactly like a
play." The scenery is perfect enough to be a painted backdrop. When a little dog trots on-stage, then off again, she
realizes that not only is sheand everyone elsethe audience, but they are also the actors. She has her part to play; that
is why she comes at the same time each week: so that she will be on time for her performance! This wonderfully
romantic idea captures her imagination. It is, she thinks, the reason that she "had quite a queer, shy feeling at telling her
English pupils how she spent her Sunday afternoons." (In those days, the theater was not considered a proper or
legitimate career and also had dark, often sexual connotations). She imagines telling the old man whom she reads to that,
yes, she is an actress, that she "has been an actress for a long time."
She has entered fully now into the world she has previously only observed. She is a part of the play, someone in the cast
who would be missed if she were not to come on Sunday afternoons. She delights in this newfound role as the band
begins to play again. The music is "warm and sunny," yet there is a "faint chill" to it, echoing the beginning of the story.
It makes her want to sing and, as the music gets brighter, she believes that the whole company of actors in her little
theater in the park will start singing together at any moment, "and then she, too, and the others on the benches." Having
entered the world, she is on the verge of becoming active in it. She feels at one with all the other actors. Her eyes fill
with tears and she knows that they understand, although what they understand she is not quite sure.
It is at this moment of epiphany, when she feels a connection to the world, that a young couple arrives and sits on the
bench. Miss Brill casts them immediately as the hero and heroine of her drama. She imagines them as just having arrived
from his father's yacht and "with that trembling smile," she listens to their dialogue. But the dialogue is not heroic, but
vulgar and common. The boy is trying to seduce the girl, and she is playfully, half-heartedly resisting his advances.
In the next few sentences, Miss Brill's illusions are shattered, and she is forced to confront her life as it is. Brutal and
direct, the boy asks: "Why does she come here at allwho wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home."
And the girl answers: "It's her fu-fur which is so funny.... It's exactly like a fried whiting," comparing the woman's stole
to dead fish. Miss Brill has discovered her part in her play, and now she finds that it is a tragedy, not a romance.
She leaves the park and goes home. She does not even stop at the bakery for her Sunday treat. Instead, she goes straight
to her "little dark roomher room like a cupboard," which again connects her to the old, odd, silent people on the park
benches whom she has imagined as having come from just such rooms. She sits on the bed and puts her fur away in its
box, but as she does, she hears something crying. She has now withdrawn so far from the world that has hurt her, that
she does not realize that it is she who is crying.

Source Citation:
Peltier, Robert. "Overview of Miss Brill." EXPLORING Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource
Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007



Additional material:
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, volume(s) 2:458; 8:282-86; 39:296, 303-04, 321, 324; 164:236, 244, 247, 307, 320
Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 9:287, 299, 307, 309, 312-13; 81:34
Exploring Short Stories



"Miss Brill"
Katherine Mansfield
For Teachers
SUGGESTED APPROACHES
"Miss Brill" is a story that challenges many of society's ideas about lonely old women. Miss Brill is a
harmless woman who finds pleasure in observing and eavesdropping on the people who visit the
park every Sunday. Unlike the stock character of the meddlesome, bitter, and misanthropic spinster,
Miss Brill delights in the abbreviated dramas that evoke her interest and her empathy and which she
has come to expect each week. She eagerly anticipates the band, the music, the children, the
passersby, and the conversation of people who stop to sit on her "special" bench. Although
impatient with a woman complaining about her need to wear glasses and offended by the insensitive
actions of the man who encounters a woman in an ermine toque, these responses provide depth to
Miss Brill's character. However, Miss Brill's readings of the people she observes in the park are
merely conjectures, even more subjective than normal daily encounters. Miss Brill is not only an
observer in these public dramas, but she is also a foreign observer. She is in another country, and
although she speaks the language, she is not a native. So, she has made a comfortable place for
herself between the scenes she observes and the relationships she imagines.
Miss Brill teaches her English pupils and cares for an invalid gentleman, a purposeful albeit a dull
life. The voyeuristic pleasure she derives from the park visitors, her only source of amusement,
culminates in a startling realization that she and the other visitors are "all on the stage" and that she
also has a small part in the performance. This epiphany is followed by a mystical flash; she imagines
everyone in the park is singing in universal harmony. At that moment, a young and beautiful couple,
obviously in love, sits alongside Miss Brill. Ironically, their entry into her little play, as the imagined
hero and heroine direct from his father's yacht, is not the expected happy finale. Instead, she
overhears them whispering a litany of cruel and demeaning comments about her. Her innocent
drama has been altered; she has been dragged center stage as a character for cruel consideration. The
devastating and permanent consequences of the young couple's thoughtless behavior are intimated
by her hasty retreat home "into the little dark room," and the sound of crying. The abrupt and
unexpected ending underscores that the pain inflicted on Miss Brill can only be imagined. "Miss
Brill" is an extraordinary opportunity to engage students in an important discussion about malicious
acts, thoughtless hurtful remarks, and the consequences of callous cruelty. It also provides a good
example for cross-cultural analysis. How secure are any of our safe harbors when we are away from
our native homes? How can we ever be sure of our assumptions about relationships when the
language is not our own?
CONNECTIONS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
THE BEDFORD INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE
Inside Connections
"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane (text p. 308)
"Eveline," by James Joyce (text p. 532)
"IND AFF, or Out of Love in Sarajevo," by Fay Weldon (text p. 210)


Outside Connections
"Araby," by James Joyce
Ideal anticipations rise first, and are most painfully dashed, in the hearts of the young. This story
contrasts ideal love with crass flirtation.
"The Little Governess," by Katherine Mansfield
As in "Miss Brill," Mansfield's mastery of the story of a naive Englishwoman confronted by a by
a corrupt Continental world is perfectly exhibited in this story of intercultural confusion.
For Students


WORDS TO KNOW
eiderdown: bed linens stuffed with the down of the eider duck
rogue: a troublemaker or scoundrel; a playful mischief-maker
rotunda: a circular building, normally with a dome
cupboards: closets or cabinets, usually used for kitchen storage
gravely: seriously
ermine: the valuable fur of weasels having a white winter coat
toque: a brimless, close-fitting woman's hat
resolute: unwavering; adamant; characterized by determination

QUESTIONS ON MAIN POINT AND MEANING
1. The first paragraph of "Miss Brill" largely describes Miss Brill as she is taking a fox fur out of a
box. What does this description reveal about her character?
2. What specific emotions does Miss Brill experience during her numerous opportunities to
eavesdrop or observe various people in the park?
3. What details does Miss Brill notice about the park visitors that indicate she is a shrewd observer?
4. Miss Brill observes both old and young people at the park. How does she characterize or
distinguish between them? What is ironic about her view of old people?
5. Other than her Sunday walk in the park, how does Miss Brill spend her time? What do these
activities suggest about Miss Brill's attitudes and values?
6. How does the setting contribute to the story's effectiveness?
7. How do the sounds of music and singing illuminate the main character and the mood of the
story?
8. Describe the two revelations Miss Brill experiences. How do these events function in the story
and how are they different or similar?
9. What is the effect of the last detail in the story, "when she put the lid on she thought she heard
something crying"?
10. What is the narrator's attitude toward Miss Brill?

QUESTIONS ON LITERARY ELEMENTS
1 How does the use of irony in "Miss Brill" contribute to the pathos of the story?
2. How does the author's use of specific details give dimension to the transient and anonymous
people Miss Brill observes in the park?

MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
1. The description of Miss Brill removing her fox fur from its box reveals that she is
a. eccentric.
b. delusional.
c. melancholy.
d. unstable.
e. comical.

2. Miss Brill eavesdrops on people's conversations because she is


a. malicious.
b. nosey.
c. lonely.
d. unhappy.
e. jealous.

3. The phrase "ermine toque" is an example of
a. paradox.
b. irony.
c. hyperbole.
d. metonymy.
e. oxymoron.

4. Music is a recurring motif that is meant to
a. convey the change in season.
b. develop the minor characters.
c. foreshadow tragic events.
d. represent Miss Brill's internal struggle.
e. parallel Miss Brill's emotions.

5. The conversation between the young lovers which is overheard by Miss Brill can best be
characterized as
a. juvenile.
b. cruel.
c. arrogant.
d. innocent.
e. sarcastic.

6. Miss Brill describes the old people, "as though they'd just come from . . . cup-boards." This
metaphor compares old people to
a. antique teacups.
b. priceless china.
c. porcelain dolls.
d. decaying food.
e. forgotten dishes.

7. The author's tone is
a. scornful.
b. accusatory.
c. compassionate.


d. condescending.
e. cynical.

8. The end of the story indicates that Miss Brill will
a. stop eavesdropping.
b. never again wear fox fur.
c. retreat from the world.
d. seek the company of people her age.
e. explore other means of recreation.

9. Miss Brill projects her subjective significances onto the little dramas she witnesses because
a. she is a foreigner living in France.
a. she prefers soft fiction to harsh reality
b. she has little life experience.
c. she cannot understand what people are saying.
d. she attempts to order even the out-side world.

10. Miss Brill is shocked at the young couple's comments because
a. she did not imagine young people spoke openly about sex.
b. they used bad language.
c. she recognized them as two of her students.
d. they focused on her and interpreted her in a cruel manner.
e. they did not behave as other French people behaved.
SIMULATED ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. Often in literature, a character experiences an unkind remark, a slight, or a literal or figurative
wound from which he or she never completely recovers. What event occurs in "Miss Brill" that
changes the main character, and what might be the long-term consequences of this event?
2. Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players."
Describe Miss Brill as both an observer of and a participant in the drama that takes place in the
park. How is the drama a microcosm or a small-scale representation of the larger world?
SUGGESTED WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Miss Brill is initially portrayed as eccentric and quirky; however, the author ultimately evokes our
admiration and our sympathy for her. Write an essay describing the author's use of detail and events
to develop this character. Is it significant that Miss Brill is a foreigner in the society she is observing?
2. Write an essay comparing the actions and behaviors of the old people with the actions and
behaviors of the young people. What purpose does the contrast serve in developing the theme of
the story?
Stories for Further Reading



Plot Summary: "Miss Brill"

Introduction
"Miss Brill," Katherine Mansfield's short story about a woman's Sunday outing to a park, was published in her 1922
collection of stories entitled The Garden Party. The story's enduring popularity is due in part to its use of a stream-of-
consciousness narrative in which Miss Brill's character is revealed through her thoughts about others as she watches a
crowd from a park bench. Mansfield's talent as a writer is illustrated by the fact that she at no point tells what Miss Brill
is thinking about her own life, yet the story draws one of the most succinct, complete character portraits in twentieth-
century short fiction. "Miss Brill" has become one of Mansfield's most popular stories, and has been reprinted in
numerous anthologies and collections. The story is typical of Mansfield's style; she often employed stream-of-
consciousness narration in order to show the psychological complexity of everyday experience in her characters' lives.
Plot
The Jardins Publiques (Public Gardens) in a French town on an early autumn Sunday afternoon is the setting for "Miss
Brill." The air is still, but there is a "faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip," so Miss Brill is
happy to have worn her fur stole. The stole is a red eiderdown, and in accordance to the fashions of the times, was
constructed so that its fake eyes and nose could be attached to its tail, securing it around the wearer's neck. It is the first
time she has worn it in a while. When preparing for her stroll in the park, she gives it a "good brush," "[rubs] the life
back into the dim little eyes," and teasingly calls it her "little rogue."
Miss Brill watches the people in the park with delight. The band sounds "louder and gayer" to her than it has on
previous Sundays. She listens to the concert from her "`special' seat" and is disappointed when the other two people
seated there do not speak. Her favorite pastime on Sunday afternoon is to eavesdrop on people's conversations.
In one observation, Miss Brill notices that all the people sitting on the benches listening to the band are "odd, silent,
nearly all old" and "looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms or eveneven cupboards." As Miss Brill
listens to the band and watches the children playing, her thoughts drift from the pupils to whom she teaches English, to
the old man to whom she reads the newspaper four days a week.
As her exuberance grows, Miss Brill likens her position as that of an actress in a play. As dramas are acted out in the
park, Miss Brill realizes that she is a character, too: "Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody
would have noticed if she hadn't been there." She delights in the metaphor. The band, which had been taking a break,
resumes playing. Miss Brill thinks that the "whole company" might begin singing along at any moment. They would sing
something "so beautifuland moving." She feels a vague sense of community with the rest of the people in the park.
A young couple, well-dressed and in love, come and sit near her, and Miss Brill imagines them to be the hero and
heroine of the play. She listens to their conversation, but instead of revealing dialogue that fulfills Miss Brill's fantasy of
theater, the girl makes fun of Miss Brill's fur collar. The boy, trying to appease his girlfriend, says "Why does she come
here at allwho wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?'" The girl, snickering, compares the
woman's fur to a dead fish, saying that it looks like a "fried whiting."
Miss Brill's reaction to the comments are not recorded. Instead, she forgoes her usual stop at the bakery on her way back
to her "little dark roomher room like a cupboard," where she sits silently for a long time. Finally, she unclasps her fur
quickly without looking at it. As she places it back in the box, she thinks that she hears "something crying."


Characters
Miss Brill: Miss Brill is a middle-aged, unmarried English woman who lives alone in a small apartment in France. She
teaches English to students and reads the newspaper to an elderly man several times a week. One of her prized
possessions is a fur necklet that she wears on a Sunday visit to the town's park. The story takes place during one of these
Sunday visits in which she eavesdrops on people's conversations and listens to the band. Miss Brill is an astute observer
of others, noticing that the other people sitting on the park benches seem "odd" as if they had "just come from dark
little rooms." She fails, however, to realize that she is one of them. Enchanted by the crisp air and the advent of the
Season, Miss Brill compares the park to a stage, and the peopleincluding herselfas actors and actresses in a play.
The metaphor takes on the proportions of an epiphany in which she believes that she has finally connected with the
community. The realization fills her with joy, and she imagines a young, attractive couple on the bench next to her as the
play's hero and heroine. She has made a false connection, though, she realizes when instead of partaking of romantic
dialogue, the couple insult her. She has managed to connect with others only in her fantasy. Miss Brill retreats to her
apartment without having succeeded in establishing the human contact she desperately wants and has sought. Miss Brill,
however, suppresses her sorrow when she imagines that she hears her fur stole crying as she returns it to its box. She is
unable to recognize the feeling as her own, just as she has been unable to see herself as others in the park perceive her.
Fur necklet: Miss Brill's fur necklet, a red eiderdown with "dim little eyes," a nose "that wasn't at all firm," and a mouth
that bites "its tail just by her left ear," assumes many human characteristics in the story. It is a friend to Miss Brill, who
calls it her "little rogue," and whose eyes ask the question "What has been happening to me?"a question that the
woman is not able to ask of herself. The fur lives in a box, just as its owner lives in a "dark little room," and together
they visit the park on Sunday afternoon. After Miss Brill's day has been spoiled, however, she returns to her apartment
and stashes the fur back in its box, ashamed that it has brought her ridicule from people she has admired. The fur, she
imagines, is cryingyet another human characteristic Miss Brill ascribes to her fur, which has come to symbolize Miss
Brill herself.
The woman in the ermine toque: The woman in the ermine toque whom Miss Brill observes in the park symbolizes the
title character herself, and her rebuff by a man in a gray suit foreshadows Miss Brill's rejection later in the story. Miss
Brill notes that the woman's fur hat is "shabby," bought when "her hair was yellow"; characteristics that could apply to
the observer herself, though she fails to realize this. The woman is delighted to see the man in the gray suit, just as Miss
Brill is delighted by the young couple who approach her bench. When he blows smoke in the woman's face, Miss Brill
feels the rejection personally by imagining the drum beat of the band calling out "The Brute! The Brute!"
The young romantic couple: The young, romantic couple approach the bench from which Miss Brill is watching the
crowd. They are "beautifully dressed" and in love. Immediately, they become the hero and heroine of Miss Brill's
imaginary play. However, instead of revealing some sprightly romantic dialogue, the boy and girl are having a quarrel in
which the girl insists, "Not here, I can't." In an effort to placate his girlfriend, the "hero" condemns Miss Brill, asking,
"who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?" In response, the girl giggles that it is the woman's fur
that she finds so distracting. Thus, the couple's dialogue, instead of fitting in with Miss Brill's conception of the situation
as a stage play in which they are all welcome characters, makes her realize that her presence in the park is not wanted.

Source Citation:
"Plot Summary: 'Miss Brill'." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson
Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007


Alienation in Miss Brill
"Alienation in 'Miss Brill'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. V, no. 1, Fall, 1967, pp.
746.
[In the following essay, Hull analyzes the principal theme of "Miss Brill", which he states is estrangement from love, and
which Mansfield stated was her primary reason for writing the story. ]
The principal theme of Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill" is estrangement. Miss Mansfield gives in this story a significant
look, through the eyes of Miss Brill, a look short and startling and at once full of pity, at the world that the lonely woman
inhabits. Indeed, Miss Brill's world is more than lonely; it is also an existential world in which she finds herself in
complete solitude estranged from God, man, and, more importantly, from herself. Explicators of the story have wholly
or partly ignored the theme of estrangement that I feel is the major theme.
Two passages from Miss Mansfield's letters to John Middleton Murry present evidence for her purpose in writing "Miss
Brill." "One writes (one reason why is) because one does care so passionately that one must show itone must declare
one's love." In another letter she writes: "Last night I walked about and saw the new moon with the old moon in her
arms and the lights in the water and the hollow pools full of starsand lamented there was no God. But I came in and
wrote `Miss Brill' instead; which is my insect Magnificat now and always." The reason for writing and the mood reflected
in these two passages point to a clearer definition of purpose in "Miss Brill" than anyone has shown. Lamenting an
absence of God and striving to show that one must love, Miss Mansfield created Miss Brill, who strives to show love but
is incapable of showing or receiving it. In her solitude she is certainly not protected by any godly benevolence. It is the
estrangement from love that alienates Miss Brill.
Some obvious elements of alienation occur in Miss Brill's name and in her residence. Miss Brill's name in French (briller)
means to shine. The irony is that she does not shine but is indeed a dull spinster without a shining personality or the
warming glow of love. In a Swiftian sense, the name further suggests Miss Brill's estrangement from herself. All that she
can see and know of herself is that "varnish and tinsel" of the surface. Her fur is the most obvious of the surface fixtures
with which she identifies. Secondly, Miss Brill is an alien in France. This fact alone can account for some of her
estrangement and inability to communicate freely. However, we can find the less obvious indications of alienation in the
paradoxes and comparative events.
The story opens with a thematic paradox. From the description of the atmosphere"the blue sky powdered with gold
and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques ... the air was motionless, but when you
opened your mouth there was a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf
came driftingfrom nowhere, from the sky"one immediately can feel the first throes of autumn, that "faint chill"
anticipating the colder chill of winter. Yet paradoxically, Miss Brill finds in the chill the feeling of the vibrancy of spring.
She takes out her fur piece, renews it for the season, questions its appearance, and then like an awakening "she felt a
tingling in her hands and arms, but that came from walking, she supposed. And when she breathed, something light and
sadno, not sad, exactlysomething gentle seemed to move in her bosom." This passage certainly parallels the passage
beginning what Miss Welty calls Miss Brill's "vision of love." "The Band had been having a rest. Now they started again.
And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chilla something, what was it?not sadnessno,
not sadnessa something that made you want to sing." The "chill" or the "something" points directly yet subtly to Miss
Brill's alienation. For her, lovethe love of her fur piece, which functions like an unsympathetic mirror into which she
cannot see, and the "vision of love," in which she imagines all those gathered in the park singing and thus
communicating with one anotheris faintly chill because she has been somehow excommunicated from a real
experience of love. Thus not knowing love's warmth or having any framework of reference for the experience of love,
she can feel or imagine love only in the solitude devoid of warmth, estranged and left cold with absence.
A further suggestion of estrangement is in the meeting of the woman in the ermine toque and the man in the gray suit.
The man rejects the woman, whom Miss Brill admires and with whom she identifies. Mansfield drives home the
rejection with the man's blowing smoke in the woman's face and with the beat of the bass drum drumming "the Brute,


the Brute." Miss Brill in her identification feels that her experiences of rejection are like those experienced by the
flirtatious woman. However, as Mr. Thorp points out, the woman is probably a prostitute. Miss Brill, not understanding
the nature of the woman, fails to see the significance of her identification. Both women passionately desire to express
their love, the woman wearing the toque through the physical contact of sex; Miss Brill through what she imagines.
Society rebuffs both expressions. It rejects the one because sex is only one manifestation of love; it rejects the other
because of failure to communicate (society cannot read Miss Brill's mind). Katherine Mansfield says in her letter "... one
must declare one's love." Miss Brill's declaration is unheard and thus, to society, unexpressed.
We can find still further evidence of alienation in the "vision of love," in which Miss Brill is gathered up into an
imaginative experience with all the people gathered in the park singing together as a harmonious whole. But even this
imaginative attempt at an expression of love fails as Miss Brill thinks: "Yes, we understand, we understand ... though
what they understood she didn't know." Even in her most vivid imaginings, Miss Brill can find no understanding or
communication. She finds herself completely alone, yet she denies or fails to understand or to confront her position.
The final and most overwhelming evidence of alienation is the tragic scene in which Miss Brill is rebuffed by the young
man courting on the seat next to her. The rejection parallels that of the man in the gray suit blowing smoke in the face of
the woman in the ermine toque. Both exclusions are crude and brutish. With this confrontation with her solitude, she
returns to her "cupboard" with nothing left her but self-pity in her loneliness.
Thus the theme of estrangement has run its course. Miss Brill has made an ever so passionate attempt to express love, to
be a part of the whole of society that means so much to her. Her imagination, though sensitive, has failed from lack of
experience. She is left, as she began, in her pathetic solitude.
Source Citation:
Hull, Robert L. "Alienation in Miss Brill." EXPLORING Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource
Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007


Themes and Construction: "Miss Brill"
Themes
Miss Brill presents an afternoon in the life of a middle-aged spinster. On her usual Sunday visit to the park, she
imagines that she and the people in the park are characters in a play. Contributing to her good mood is the fact that she
is wearing her prized fur stole. Anticipating the conversation of two strangers who sit down next to her, Miss Brill's
vivacious mood is shattered by the couple's ridicule of her and her fur. She returns to her tiny apartment and places the
fur back in its box, imagining that she hears "something crying."
Alienation and Loneliness
Though Miss Brill does not reveal it in her thoughts, her behavior indicates that she is a lonely woman. She thinks of no
family members during her Sunday outing, instead focusing on her few students and the elderly man to whom she reads
the newspaper several times a week. Even her name, Miss Brill, suggests an isolating formality; with the absence of a first
name, the reader is never introduced to her on a personal level. Her fantasy, in which she imagines the people in the
park as characters in a play connected in some psychological and physical way to one another, reveals her loneliness in a
creative way. Yet, her manufactured sense of connection to these strangers is shattered when she is insulted by the young
couple that sit next to her on the bench. When her fantasy of playacting is crushed by the conversation of the romantic
couple, she is shown to be alienated from her environmentestranged and apart from the others in the park, to whom
she only imagined a connection. Symbolically, this sense of alienation is heightened at the end of the story when Miss
Brill returns her fur to its box quickly and without looking at it. This action is in stark contrast to her playful
conversation with it earlier in the day, when she called it her "little rogue." The final action of the story completes the
characterization of Miss Brill as an alienated and lonely individual when she believes that she hears "something crying" as
she returns her beloved fur to its box, just as she herself has returned to her "room like a cupboard."
Appearances and Reality
Through the stream-of-consciousness narrative in Mansfield creates a story in which the stark contrast between
appearances and reality are manifest through the thoughts of the main character. At the beginning of the story, Miss Brill
is perturbed by the old couple sitting on the bench near her. Their silence makes eavesdropping on their lives difficult.
Yet, she does not realize that their behavior echoes her own silent existence. Similarly, Miss Brill notices that the other
people sitting on chairs in the park are "odd, silent, nearly all old" and "looked as though they'd just come from dark
little rooms or eveneven cupboards!" She does not recognize that, ironically, she is one of these odd people who lives
"in a cupboard." She also notices an old woman wearing a fur hat, which she calls a "shabby ermine," bought when the
woman's hair was yellow. When the woman raises her hand to her lips, Miss Brill compares it to a "tiny yellowish paw."
While making fun of this woman in her own mind, she overlooks the obvious comparisons between the "ermine toque"
and her own appearance. Later, when Miss Brill's imagination concocts the metaphor of the park visitors as actors in a
play, she thinks of them as connected to her in a harmonious way: "we understand, we understand, she thought." Yet,
the attractive couple whom she imagines to be the hero and heroine of the play are revealed through their conversation
to not be part of this "appearance" of a stage play. In the reality of their cruel comments, they are not "members of the
company" who "understand." This strong illusion of playacting Miss Brill has envisioned has been dismantled through
the harsh words of the boy and girl. In reality, they think of her not as a fellow actress, but as a "stupid old thing" whose
fur resembles a "fried whiting." The playa metaphor which produced a moment of epiphany, or revelation, for Miss
Brillhas taken place only in her mind. Thus, this contrast between appearance and reality in further illustrates the
story's theme of alienationthe idea that Miss Brill is separated and estranged from her environment.

Construction


Miss Brill presents the interior monologue of a woman on a Sunday trip to the park whose pleasant illusions are
shattered when reality infringes on her thoughts.
Setting
Miss Brill is set in the "Jardins Publiques," the French term for "public garden," or park. Miss Brill, through her name
and the indication that she tutors students in English, is revealed to be a non-native of France, and thus an outsider from
the start. These factual references reinforce her emotional isolation, which she attempts to overcome by pretending that
she is a cast member in a stage production. The pleasant weather, its crispness perfect for her fur stole, echoes Miss
Brill's good mood as she sits in the garden listening to the band and watching the people. When her illusion of
understanding with the others in the park is shattered by the comments of the young couple, however, Miss Brill retreats
to her "little dark roomher room like a cupboard." This change of setting highlights the main character's abrupt
change in mood.
Symbolism
The primary symbol in is the main character's fur stole. It assumes various lifelike traits, echoing the traits that
characterize Miss Brill herself. She has "taken it out of its box that afternoon" just as Miss Brill has left her "room like a
cupboard" for a walk in the park. It is given other human qualities: its nose "wasn't at all firm," and Miss Brill imagines
its eyes are asking "What has been happening to me?," and when she places it back in its box at the end of the story, she
thinks she hears "something crying." The boy in the park criticizes Miss Brill's appearance, suggesting that she should
"keep her silly old mug at home." Likewise, his girlfriend criticizes the fur, giggling that it looks "exactly like a fried
whiting." When Miss Brill takes the fur off at home, she does it "quickly; quickly, without looking," perhaps symbolizing
the way she has failed to examine her own life or recognize how she appears to others.
Narration
Miss Brill is told in a third-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative, a common device in Mansfield's works which
serves to heighten the story's psychological acuity and perceptive characterization. Though the narrative is third-person,
the stream-of-consciousness technique allows the reader full access to Miss Brill's thoughts, but nothing more than Miss
Brill's thoughts. Thus, the thoughts of others in the story are revealed by dialogue (such as the young couple's), or they
are not revealed at all (like the couple seated next to Miss Brill who do not speak). Likewise, the reader is privy to Miss
Brill's thoughts about her fur: "Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again," but is left to intuit much of Miss Brill's
character by what she does not realize. The stream-of-consciousness narrative reveals, for example, Miss Brill's
perception of the woman wearing an old ermine hat. Miss Brill slightly scorns the woman, calling her hat "shabby" and
her hand a "tiny yellowish paw," yet she fails to note that her own appearance is somewhat similar to the woman's. Thus,
part of Miss Brill's character is revealed by what her stream-of-consciousness narration fails to address.

Source Citation:
"Themes and Construction: 'Miss Brill'." EXPLORING Short Stories. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold.
Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007


Study Questions: "Miss Brill"

1. Explain how the narration of the story can be in the third person and yet still employ a stream-of-
consciousness technique. How would the story be different if it had been written in first person? Do you think
it would have been as successful?
2. If the story was written today, where might it take place and how might Miss Brill be dressed?
3. Mansfield stated: "One writes (one reason why is) because one does care so passionately that one must show it
one must declare one's love." Miss Brill is a character who desperately seeks love, but is incapable of giving or
receiving it. What events in the story illustrate this?

Source Citation:
"Study Questions: 'Miss Brill'." EXPLORING Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold.



Historical Context: "Miss Brill"

Europe between the Wars
In the 1920s, Europe was rebuilding after World War I, the most destructive and deadly war in history up until that time.
As the economy grew, spurred on by the advances in medicine and technology gained during the war, a newfound era of
wealth and cultural growth permeated many Western European countries. France, especially, became a haven for
expatriate artists and writers from England and the United States drawn to its affordable living conditions. The values of
the "Jazz Age" spread to the continent, where the dismantling of strict Victorian protocol resulted in the rise of
controversial art like Expressionism and Surrealism and explicit literature from writers like James Joyce.
is set during this tumultuous time period, when the sight of an older, single woman wearing an outdated fur stole
represented a genteel world forever obliterated by the atrocities of trench warfare, the promise of air travel, and the
cynicism generated by the millions of casualties in the war. Like others of her day, Miss Brill is a foreigner living in
France, but she is alienated from the thriving community of artists and writers who formed the "moveable feast" in Paris
during the 1920s. Instead, Miss Brill has a few students to whom she teaches English and she reads to an elderly
gentleman until he falls asleep. Miss Brill's association with this man further represents her alignment with an era now
obsolete. The young couple on the bench are of a younger generation, and their comments reveal the attitude towards
which young people now regarded their elders.
Mansfield, whose numerous affairs always marked her as a bit of a free spirit, fit into this new social order quite
comfortably. However, by the time she wrote she was weak from tuberculosis and exerted the bulk of her energy writing
stories and letters. In England, the Bloomsbury writers, a loosely-knit group that included Virginia Woolf and whose
main literary goal was to eradicate the old social order of the Victorians, were in frequent correspondence with
Mansfield. In Mansfield created one of her most famous characterizations; one that illustrates the illusions of the old
order and how they are shown to be just that: illusions.

Source Citation:
"Historical Context: 'Miss Brill'." EXPLORING Short Stories. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson



Sample Student Essay on Katherine Mansfields Miss Brill
Prompt: Discuss how the author's choice of a particular point of view helps communicate a central theme of the tale. Develop a clear
argument to show how the narrator's point of view is essential to the audience's recognizing and understanding the theme. Support your
argument with specific observations and analysis.

Mansfields Miss Brill
This short story is narrated in the third person from the point of view of the limited omniscient narrator who
primarily acts as the voice of the storys protagonist, Miss Brill. By telling the story through the eyes of the protagonist,
Mansfield is able to convey to the reader the protagonists loneliness and the lack of self-awareness. She offers no
explanation as to the Miss Brills past, leaving it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. At the same time the
author provides illuminating insights into the protagonists character and lifestyle that effectively communicate to the
reader the theme of this short story. The central theme of Miss Brill is the pain of loneliness, and inadvertent attempts
to experience life through the experiences of total strangers.
From the beginning of the narrative it becomes apparent that Miss Brill is starving for warmth and
companionship. She tenderly caresses her fur as if it were a beloved pet when she rubbs the life into the dim little eyes
of the old fox boa. Another sign of Miss Brills need for companionship is evident in her perception of the music which
the band is playing at the Jardins Publiques: It was like some one playing with only the family to listen. Despite of her
loneliness, she is considering herself a part of this family that the band is entertaining with its music. But in reality she is
more of an observer, a voyeur, and not an active participant in life as it unfolds at the Jardins Publiques. She is looking
forward to eavesdropping on other peoples conversations, believing herself to be quite an expert in remaining
unnoticed. Miss Brill adopts a more critical, at times even hostile, attitude toward the women that she observes in the
park than toward their male companions: she views the man who shares her special seat as a fine old man, while the
woman is a big old woman . When she recollects the events of the previous Sunday at the park, she remembers a
patient Englishman with the difficult to please wife, whom Miss Brill wanted to shake. These observation of the
women carry perhaps a note of envy that she feels toward the women who have male companionship.
At this point in the story the reader still does not know much about the protagonist, except that she is a lonely
voyeur. Then one of her observations about the odd, silent, nearly all old people, and from the way they stared they
looked as though theyd just come from dark little rooms or even even cupboards! whom she sees every Sunday at


the park hints to the reader that she might be one of those people. The pieces of the puzzle, of course, fall into place at
the end of the story, when the protagonists room is described as the little dark room-her room like a cupboard. This
is the conclusion of the story, when Miss Brill is able to see herself and her surroundings in the new light. Her new self-
awareness is brought about by disparaging remarks of the young lovers who refer to Miss Brill as that stupid old thing,
and to her precious fur as a fried whiting. This is Miss Brills moment of epiphany. She is as old as the other park-
goers, her fur is a pitiful necklet, and she foregoes her usual Sunday slice of honeycake. In spite of her newly found self-
awareness, Miss Brill still denies some of her own emotions when she thought she heard something crying at the very
end of the story. The tears are obviously her own.


An Explication of a Student Essay in Critical Analysis
Here we will be doing (a particular kind of) critical examination of an expository/argumentative essay. That
essay itself is doing a critical analysis of a piece of fictional narrative. (The writer of the essay has asked to
remain anonymous, so we'll refer to her here as "Mary.")
[Keep in mind that criticism, in the sense in which we are using the term, is not synonymous with "fault-
finding." See the general discussion of critical analysis.]
In the left-hand column below you will see how Mary notices what some of the moves are by which Katherine
Mansfield went about setting up the situation we are confronted with in her story Miss Brill. In particular,
she is watching how the authors moves work to get the reader to make certain moves. In the course of her
calling attention to the features of the story that work to produce certain effects, she has occasion as well to
call attention to the conventions the author takes for granted that readers will be working under if they are to
produce these effects (infer these meanings, have these reactions) on the basis of the facts she chooses and
arranges to construct what the narrator explicitly conveys.
In the right-hand column you will see me doing a particular kind of critical analysis (in the most
general sense of the term) of Marys essay. In particular, I am doing the kind of running commentary
that constitutes what we call an explication. Notice that the order of my points there is dictated by
the order in which the features commented upon unfold in the essay that is their subject. This is the
mark of explication. Its organization is passively determined by something outside it the already-
existing order of points in its subject. In writing an explication we dont have to confront the
problems of organization that higher forms of exposition must solve: I just took over (followed)
the organization that was already embodied in Marys essay. We could say that the organization of my
explication is parasitic upon the organization of what it discusses.
This is not the case with Marys essay itself. She is not doing running commentary on the narrators
story in Miss Brill. She is showing how the point of view by which the story is disclosed to
the reader contributes to the overall theme of the piece. This confronts her with three basic
tasks. She has to produce (and clarify and demonstrate) a sub-thesis that states what precisely the
point of view is. She has to commit herself to a statement (another sub-thesis) about what the storys
theme is (or at least about what some essential part of it is). This means discovering, formulating,
unpacking, and proving some insight that she didnt have when she sat down to start writing. And
she has to shape the particular way in which she develops each of these theses in such a way that we
can see how the features of point of view that shes calling attention to make possible the features of
the theme shes calling attention to. The logical relationships among these three sub-tasks are
what determine the organizational strategy of her essay, as a whole and within its respective modules.
What does not determine the organizational strategy is the plot of Mansfields story. Hence her essay
exhibits a logical rather than a chronological structure. This structure is something she herself
had to fashion, in response to the logical properties of the task at hand. She had to assume the
responsibility for actively making it.
Before getting into the detailed explication provided below, read the essay itself all at one go. Ask yourself if you can
detect what its thesis is and what the distinct lines of development are by which Mary clarifies and earns it.
When you are done, return here, and work through the frames carefully. Always read all the way through a box on the
left-hand side before proceeding to the corresponding. comments in the right-hand column. When you turn your
attention to the right-hand column, you'll make best use of the comments if you don't read them all at once, but instead
work carefully back and forth, refreshing your sense of exactly what each comment points to before thinking your way
through it.


When you come to the comment following the first paragraph, you'll need to have a fresh sense of what was said both in
the original paragraph and in the comments upon it. Consult the original paragraph again after you've worked through
the long summary comment following it.
This is rather dense stuff, so you may want to take a rest from time to time.
Mansfields Miss Brill When youve finished writing your essay, give some careful thought to fashioning an
appropriate title. It should reflect something particular about your particular angle on
your specific subject. Just one example: Inside an Outsider: The Pathos of
Loneliness in Mansfields Miss Brill.

This short story is narrated in the third
person from the point of view of the limited
omniscient narrator who primarily acts as
the voice of the storys protagonist, Miss
Brill. By telling the story through the eyes of
the protagonist, Mansfield is able to convey
to the reader the protagonists loneliness
and the lack of self-awareness. She offers no
explanation as to the Miss Brills past,
leaving it to the readers to draw their own
conclusions. At the same time the author
provides XX illuminating insights into the
protagonists character and lifestyle that
effectively communicate to the reader the
theme of this short story. The central theme
of Miss Brill is the pain of loneliness, and
inadvertent attempts to experience life
through the experiences of total strangers.
Right on. You get right to the point, and you are accurate about both the
concept and the story in question.
Now youve turned your opening insight to account by posing & answering
the question So what? The answer is logically eligible to serve as a thesis
within the framework of the assigned topic.
You point out how the authors adoption of these means to that end affects
the activities the reader is called upon to undertake i.e, how it defines the
readers task. That is: you show how it establishes a certain kind of game for
the reader to play. (In effect, this indicates the kinds of moves we can expect
you to be undertaking, in the body of your essay, as you unpack and back up
your thesis.)
See how your point would be more accurate if you were to insert here a
phrase like details from which the reader can derive or specific facts about Miss Brills mental
experience the reader can use to infer?
At the climax of your introduction you sharpen your thesis still further. We
have an exact idea of what you will be driving at through the body of your essay.

From the beginning of the narrative it becomes
apparent that Miss Brill is starving for warmth
and companionship. She tenderly caresses her
fur as if it were a beloved pet when she rubs
the life into the dim little eyes (p.50) of the
old fox boa. Another sign of Miss Brills need
for companionship is evident in her perception
of the music which the band is playing at the
Jardins Publiques: It was like some one
playing with only the family to listen (p.50).
Despite of her loneliness, she is considering
herself a part of this family that the band is
entertaining with its music. But in reality she is
more of an observer, a voyeur, and not an
active participant in life as it unfolds at the
Jardins Publiques. She is looking forward to
Here you give a restatement of your thesis, but you do it in a way that
advances it beyond mere repetition. Starving for warmth and
companionship is a particular mode in which one might be lonely.
You then back this up with an example. And, in fact, the one you feature
at just this juncture is a gesture on Miss Bs part that speaks especially to the
warmth idea (fur) in connection with the companionship idea (pet),
intensifying each in that the pet is not only not a real person but dead, an
effigy.
You proceed to give an additional example. This one requires to be
developed in steps, and you undertake each. You promise something more
and anchor it in a specific fact. Then you provide a citation to anchor that
characterization in turn. Then you explain, in two parts


eavesdropping on other peoples conversations,
believing herself to be quite an expert in
remaining unnoticed. Miss Brill adopts a more
critical, at times even hostile, attitude toward
the women that she observes in the park than
toward their male companions: she views the
man who shares her special seat as a fine
old man, while the woman is a big old
woman (p.50). When she recollects the events
of the previous Sunday at the park, she
remembers a patient Englishman with the
difficult to please wife, whom Miss Brill
wanted to shake (p.50). These observation of
the women carry perhaps a note of envy that
she feels toward the women who have male
companionship.
(Despite.But.), how this detail establishes the point you promised.
Now you set out to give still a third example. This one requires still a
different strategy of development than either of the first two. Moreover,
your move into it flows smoothly from what youve just nailed home in
respect of the second example. Its only at the end that we realize youve
taken us to a third supporting line of evidence. Your second sentence in this
section ups the ante, since it raises the anxiety in us that you may be
wandering from the point (or that we may not be getting your drift). This
drives us forward to look for clues as to how this might be on-point after all.
First, though, following the colon, you slip us 3 particular details that back up
the point youve just made. And then you serve up the confirmation weve
been looking for
You show us what ties all these together (a disposition to feel envy).
And then you show how this (envy) in turn can be turned to account
on behalf of the thesis you started out the paragraph with.
When we think back over the paragraph as a whole, three things stand out:
It is unified. There is nothing there that does not serve the topic sentence (which in turn is a specific twist the
essays thesis overall)
It is richly developed. Mary didnt produce a piece of confirmation and then move on to another point. She
showed how to get to the same point from two additional other sorts of starting points (the last of which, in fact, is
a staging area she gets to from three distinct particular points in turn)
It is coherent. We dont lose our way in the trees as we go through the forest. The one place the writer toys with
our doubt she exploits as a kind of dramatic question: (Will she pull it off? Or will she drive over the cliff?)
This suspense she then proceeds directly to resolve in a way that provides us the satisfaction of reassurance as an
underlining of the point she makes that recoups the venture. Part of what serves this coherence is a pleasing
overall strategy of deployment of the evidence that she has discovered she is able to give. We notice that she
begins with the shortest subtask to get through, then takes up the next longest, and concludes with the one that
takes the most elaboration to pull off
This has the effect of communicating the thoroughness of her thesis grounding in the facts of the story: we appreciate
that it not only runs close to the surface but also runs more widely and deeply through (behind) the explicit facts of
Miss Brills consciousness that the narrator directly acquaints us with.
The fact that we can confirm the notions we start with suspecting only by going deeper into the texture of the facts
implications connects with the fact that the point of view of the story is so contrived as to afford us a double vision: we
get to participate directly in Miss Brills consciousness of the scene; and, on reflection, we are enabled to understand
some aspects of what that signifies that Miss Brill herself is screening out of that experience, because they are too
painful namely the intensity of the pain of loneliness that is driving her to these delightful attempts to connect. We
are thus invited to become aware of an irony: what motivates (and thus explains) her conscious experience is something
that is not a part of this conscious experience, something that that experience excludes (until the epiphany at the storys
end). (Note, by the way, that there are some points here that Mary could have explicitly incorporated into her analysis.)
Mary's organizational strategy is thus not only pleasing (from small to big, from the easier to pull off to the harder to
pull off) but implicitly supports in a subtle way the overall thesis of her essay, about how the point of view serves
the storys theme.


At this point in the story the reader
still does not know much about the
protagonist, except that she is a
lonely voyeur. Then one of her
observations about the odd, silent,
nearly all old people, and from the
way they stared they looked as
though theyd just come from dark
little rooms or even even
cupboards! (p.51) whom she sees
every Sunday at the park hints to the
reader that she might be one of
those people. The pieces of the
puzzle, of course, fall into place at
the end of the story, when the
protagonists room is described as
the little dark room-her room like a
cupboard (p.52). This is the
conclusion of the story, when Miss Brill
is able to see herself and her
surroundings in the new light. Her new
self-awareness is brought about by
disparaging remarks of the young lovers
who refer to Miss Brill as that stupid
old thing (p.52), and to her precious
fur as a fried whiting (p.52). This is
Miss Brills moment of epiphany. She is
as old as the other park-goers, her
fur is a pitiful necklet, and she
foregoes her usual Sunday slice of
honeycake. In spite of her newly
found self-awareness, Miss Brill still
denies some of her own emotions
when she thought she heard
something crying (p.52) at the very
end of the story. The tears are
obviously her own.
This turns out to be an effective transition. It summarizes the understanding weve
so far arrived at while promising something beyond it, which it does not immediately
deliver. It tells us what sort of thing to be on the look-out for, and thus shapes our
attention in a relevant way for whats down the pike. [Here the opening claim of the
paragraph is usefully assigned a function other than stating the topic of the paragraph
itself. Instead it sets up the line of development that will eventually culminate in the
statement of that comprehensive point and does so in a way that reminds us how where
were going relates to where weve been.]
Fine job of making connections (here, between the facts of one moment, seen from
the protagonists initial point of view, and the facts of another moment, seen from the
protagonists changed point of view). And in each node (between which the connection
runs) the writer provides the concrete details that establish her specific point. Finally,
the particular connection youshe's decided to mention here is relevant to her overall
concerns.
Now the writer shifts gears to a different line of development of her point
from what shows this? to how did it come to be? (What, in the plot, makes this
changed vision plausible for the character? Thats a concern we have since were playing
under the rules of realism.. Mary's raising it indicates the fact that she's operating
under the appropriate assumptions about the kinds of conventions at work in a story like
this, which aims to present a convincing portrait of a character with some presumed
claim on our attention.)
[Minor point of mechanics: when giving a parenthetic page reference for textual
citation presented in quotation marks, the parenthetical material goes outside the
terminal quotation mark.]
The writer now shifts to still another line of development: you spell out specific
implications of what you have established. (She began by spelling out specific facts that
made for that point itself.) That is: she now asks So what?
She concludes her characterization of Miss Brills final state of awareness by noting
its limitations a point of connection with, a hold-over from, where the protagonist
was at the beginning.
Mary is thus striving both for precision in capturing the state of affairs itself
and for relationship to what it developed out of.
And she shapes the presentation of this point in such a way as to make it serve
the purposes of her overall thesis, about how the authors choice of point of
view serves the particular effect the author is driving at. Here: once again, the
reader is able both to share Miss Brills experience, and to go beyond it to
an understanding of it that is not a part of it. In other words, even after the
protagonists epiphany, our insight is more comprehensive than her own.
[Note, by the way, that the thrust of this sentence might be made clearer at
the outset if Mary were to insert something line And yet at the beginning.]
Another thing Mary's final sentence accomplishes: in a different (and more
sharply focused) way than at the outset of this paragraph, the reader is shown
how where weve just arrived relates to where wed been before.


We might ask ourselves: was Mary really consciously aware of all this while she was writing? She may well have been.
This is a pretty deft piece of writing, and there's no reason we shouldn't suppose that the author of it was not
deliberately working with these factors in mind. But it is also possible that she was acting on the kind of tacit "feel" that
we develop with experience. The organizational strategy works for any reader who is responding to the overall structure
of the paragraph as a whole, and it's hard to imagine a writer being able to craft a paragraph like this without working
from a sense of how the entire paragraph unrolls. Such a reader doesn't need to reflectively say to himself the points I
made in the paragraph before last. The "feel" of the paragraph can communicate those ideas to us "tacitly."
But it is crucial that we be the kind of reader that can register such a progression (small to large, obvious to subtle) in the
deployment of successive pieces of evidence on behalf of a claim. If we are the kind of reader who can only attend to
one thing at a time, we are not yet ready even to register structure. Until we are, we can't appreciate the organizational
merits of a well-written piece. Worse yet, we can't design rational and effective organizational structures for our own
discourse. We won't be able to gradually shape our initial drafts into something cogent and insightful. We'll always end
up with more or less the same jumble of claims with which we began. More on this later on.

Work Cited
Mansfield, Katherine. Miss Brill. An Introduction to Fiction. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.
7
th
ed. New York: Longman, 1999. 50-52

[Dont forget the
period at the end
of the page
references.]
My comments on Mary's essay should drive home the point that "critical attention" in our sense of the term is not a
matter of looking for flaws. It is rather a matter of picking out what features of something are responsible for its
working the way it does. (If something is not working well, we come to notice that, too, of course. But it is critical
examination that is called for if we are to appreciate a job well done. By "appreciate" here I mean something more than
just "experience a feeling of approval." I mean to have a clear rational understanding of why something works.)
Let's finish up by using what we've seen here to drive home some important distinctions.
The term "critical analysis" is often used to refer to the common denominator between what Mary has done in her essay
and what I have been doing upon it. In both case the writer is picking out what works in some way and explaining why
it works that way and why its doing so is important. But among ourselves we will foster clarity on an important point if
we reserve the term "critical analysis" to refer to the sort of thing that Mary has been up to, and use some other term to
refer to the kind of thing you have just seen me do. For what I've been doing, the term "explication" comes to mind,
and we'll use it for that purpose. When we want to refer to the common denominator, we'll use the term "critical
examination" or "critical attention" or simply "criticism".
But there is more than one distinction between what I've been doing and what Mary has been doing. Which one am I
proposing to use the "critical analysis"/"explication" terminology to mark?
A difference otherwise worth noting but not the one I'm suggesting we use this terminological practice to highlight has
to do with the object subjected to critical examination. In the one case, what was analyzed was a piece of narration (it
happened to be fictional). In the other, what was under commentary happened to be an essay. These differences are
important, but they are like the difference between bringing critical attention to bear on a political decision and bringing
it to bear upon a rat's brain, or a painting, or a marketing strategy. In each case the things it makes sense to notice -- to
select for attention -- and the kinds of functions one wants to explain are obviously different. (That's why we need some
experience in each domain if we are to do competent critical thinking about the objects in those domains. [At the same
time, the more experience we have doing either explication or critical analysis of football or poems, the more quickly
we'll get the hang of doing critical thinking in regard to essays in philosophy or anthropology or in business.])


The distinction I'm proposing we use "explication" and "critical analysis" in this particular way to keep ourselves clear
upon has rather to do with the kind of overall organizational strategy at work.
Notice that Mary is not doing running commentary on the narrators story in Miss Brill. In accordance with the
assignment, she is showing how the point of view by which the story is disclosed to the reader contributes to the
overall theme of the piece. This confronts her with three basic tasks. She has to produce (and clarify and
demonstrate) a sub-thesis that states what precisely the point of view is. She has to commit herself to a statement
(another sub-thesis) about what the storys theme is (or at least about what some essential part of it is). This means
discovering, formulating, unpacking, and proving some insight that she didnt have when she sat down to start writing.
And she has to shape the particular way in which she develops each of these theses in such a way that we can see how
the features of point of view that shes calling attention to make possible the features of the theme shes calling attention
to. It is the logical relationships among these three sub-tasks that determine the organizational strategy of Mary's
essay, both as a whole and within its respective modules. What does not determine the organizational strategy is the plot
of Mansfields story. Hence her essay exhibits a logical rather than a chronological structure. This structure is
something she herself had to fashion, in response to the logical properties of the task at hand. She had to assume the
responsibility for actively making it.
In contrast, though my comments do exhibit logical structure individually and internally, nevertheless the order by which
one comment follows another is given not by any comprehensive hierarchy of tasks of my own, but by the order in which
Marys moves happened to emerge, as determined by the necessities under which they were governed. My overall structure
thus has no inherent logic of its own. Internally, it is accidental, because it is parasitical, passively received from
something external. If Mary had done the equivalent, she would have organized her points strictly according to the
order in which the details with which they are associated happen to emerge in Mansfields story. But that would not
have been a proper means to adopt for the end in view. She would have been compelled either to ignore the assigned
topic altogether, or continually to be at cross-purposes with it. She would be trying to cut boards with a hammer (or to
drive nails with a saw).
Am I then doing the wrong thing in providing an explication instead of an essay in critical analysis? No, because my
purposes here are different from Marys. My job here is a particular sort of coachs job. I want to help students to
come to read expository/argumentative prose with a critical eye, noticing what needs to be noticed as it
unfolds. Why is that? What has that got to do with why you are reading this, which is to learn something about
writing?
Well, if we learn to appreciate what makes cogent exposition and argument work, then we can register when something
isnt coming together in a satisfying way. We can trouble-shoot any emerging draft we are writing so as to figure out
how to make it work better to bring it to the next stage, to tinker it into a superior draft. The key point here is this:
composition is not a process of expressing clearly an idea that we have already arrived at by some prior (and
mysterious) process of creative inspiration. Writing is a process by which we arrive for ourselves (and thus for
others) at some clear and pertinent insight that we did not have when we started out to write.
Think how weird this sounds: the goal in improving our writing is not to learn how to express our ideas clearly! I am
denying here what most people think writing courses are all about. Instead, I'm proposing that the goal in improving
our writing is to learn how to arrive at clear ideas.
But isn't that the job of "subject-matter courses"? Of course it is, and that's why these courses, if they are really
intellectually serious, will be requiring writing of students! (The fact that even higher-level university courses -- to say
nothing of large-enrollment lower-level courses -- try to dispense with requiring essay writing from students only means
that society as a whole is not willing to provide the resources it would take to offer students a real education. Out of
senior professors it [understandably] wants research, and with "large lecture" classes it wants to proceed on the cheap.
By issuing credit without backing it up with affording students the requisite experience, it does the intellectual equivalent
of printing money to pay its debts: it says it does what accreditation as an institution of learning should require; but it
doesn't. [Somewhat like the U.S. in Vietnam, it declares a victory and gets out.)


Why do we have to set aside the idea that good writing is clear expression of our ideas, and take on instead the idea that
writing is a process of arriving, by stages, at clear ideas? Let's first get a little clearer about what this latter idea contains.
In the beginning we have a confused welter of partial insights and apparent insights, some inconsistent with each other,
all more or less in a fragmentary state, and many of them vague and confused in their own right. We begin, that is, with
a muddle. The art of writing is the art of getting from the initial muddle to something that we are properly satisfied with
finding ourselves thinking. And this means: the art of writing boils down to skill in revising. Revising good news!
is something that we can learn. In fact anyone can learn it. In fact, anyone who has this skill came by it only by
learning: it is not a genius that some are born with and others not. Thats encouraging, because it means there is
hope. Everyone starts with muddle. The difference between those who end up with a muddle and those who end up
with a clear and cogent piece of writing in support of an interesting idea relevant to some purpose is not that some
people have a mysterious capacity to conceive bright ideas and also the knack for finding the words to say them. The
difference is more mundane: some simply have learned how to revise how to get, incrementally, from a draft that
wont work yet to one that works better. The paradox is that insight we can call it vision comes out of revision.
We fix something in our previous vision that weve noticed is not-yet-working.
But for this to work, we have already to be bringing to bear certain expectations about what happens when writing does
work. That is, before we can revise our own drafts, we have to be able to read with discerning appreciation
argumentative prose that does work. Explication of effective writing is well-suited to helping others see what makes
a working piece work because it demonstrates in action the mind of a reader who is making the sorts of moves
you have to make in order to do that.
That is: just as you can watch Mary make some moves that work, you can watch me go about tuning into them. And
that means you can rip off not only Marys moves, but mine. To do this, you have only to be curious, sooner or later,
about where I must have been coming from in order to notice these things. What sort of standing curiosities must I
always be bringing to bear? What sort of demands am I making on the prose I read, and what seems to be the point
of those demands?
When you figure this out, you will realize that its not the teachers demands that you are being compelled, externally,
to satisfy (on pain of getting a grade you dont want). It is the demands of your own logical equipment. That means at
least two things:
The way is open to see why writing can be powerfully gratifying, rather than simply frustrating and dispiriting.
(There will be frustrations aplenty, but they wont be dispiriting!) Arriving at a good final draft is actually a
process of satisfying some of the deepest demands of your own human nature, your inborn rational equipment,
and the pleasure we take in discovery of truth through the trial and error recognition and rectification of error.
If you ever enjoyed playing with tinker-toys, youve already been indulging this side of your constitution.

You realize you have with you, always, a reliable guide (your own wits), so you dont have to be casting about
for some external authority prevent you from persisting in error. Sooner or later, you can figure it out yourself.

Contents copyright 2000 by Lyman A. Baker.



Student Notes: A Perfect Day for Bananafish



J. D. Salinger: Seventy-Eight Bananas
"J. D. Salinger: Seventy-Eight Bananas," in Chicago Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, Winter, 1958, pp. 3-19.
[In an analysis of Salinger's protagonists, Wiegand asserts that the characters are "bananafish" who are so glutted with
experience, perceptions, and love that they are unable to function in society. The critic also explores the various ways
that Salinger tries in his fiction to resolve this "spiritual illness."]
Salinger has, in a measure, revived the
dormant art of dialect in American fiction.
His ear has detected innumerable
idiomatic expressions that were simply
unrecorded before. And with this gift he
has been able to reach a level of readers
that Mark Twain, for example, was able to
reach. Unlike others who have made the
attempt to transcribe distinctive speech
patterns, Salinger has succeeded, as few
beyond Twain have, in making his
characters something more than cracker-
barrel philosophers or, worse, good-
natured boobs.
But this achievement is somewhat self-
evident. I prefer to justify Salinger on a
second basis: namely, the coherence of his
particular vision of the world. This is
essentially the vision of his heroesof
Holden Caulfield, Seymour Glass, Teddy, Franny, Daumier Smith, and the rest. The important question in Salinger is
why these intelligent, highly sensitive, affectionate beings fight curious, gruelling battles, leaderless and causeless, in a
world they never made.
In simple terms, they are a family of non-conformists and Salinger documents their brotherhood by presenting several of
them as brothers and sisters in "Franny," "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters," and "Zooey," his most recent stories.
However, this is not traditional non-conformity. Logically, the enemy of the non-conformist is society or some
oppressive segment of society; and in the recent tradition from Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith and Hemingway's Frederick
Henry right down to Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, the non-conformist hero is constantly threatened by external forces
which seek to inhibit and to destroy him. With the Salinger hero, however, the conflict is never so cleanly drawn.... He is
a victim not so much of society as of his own spiritual illness.
Salinger has spent much of his career seeking a cure for this illness; however, before we examine that search, we need a
somewhat more precise definition of the illness. Perhaps it is best described in his second to last story "Raise High the
Roofbeam, Carpenters," a work which amplifies and explains the first of the Nine Stories, "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish." ... Without "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters" the suicide which closes "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish" appears motivated chiefly by Seymour's inability to put up with his bourgeois wife. With "Raise High the
Roofbeam, Carpenters," however, we see Seymour as a man not deprived of, but rather surfeited with, the joy of life.
Salinger's sole excuse for Seymour's desperate social irresponsibility is this same curious surfeit of sensation.
We learn, for example, in the course of "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters," that Seymour does not show up for his
wedding because he is too "happy," or as he puts it in his journal, he is "too keyed up ... to be with people." The nature


of this happiness is further illuminated through the use of a boyhood experience of Seymour's: at the age of twelve he
threw a stone at a young girl, scarring her for life. Seymour's brother, the narrator, explains the incident this way:
We were up at the Lake. Seymour had written to Charlotte, inviting her to come and visit us, and her mother finally let
her. What happened was, she sat down in the middle of our driveway one morning to pet Boo Boo's cat, and Seymour
threw a stone at her. He was twelve. That's all there was to it. He threw it at her because she looked so beautiful sitting
there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo's cat. Everybody knew that, for God's sakeme, Charlotte, Boo Boo,
Waker, Walt, the whole family.
Seymour's own understanding of his malady is a more poetic one. He writes in his journal:
If or when I do start going to an analyst, I hope to God he has the foresight to let a dermatologist sit in on the
consultation. A hand specialist. I have scars on my hands from touching certain people. Once, in the park, when Franny
was still in the carriage, I put my hand on the downy pate of her head and left it there too long. Another time, at Loew's
Seventy-second Street, with Zooey during a spooky movie. He was about six or seven, and he went under the seat to
avoid watching a scary scene. I put my hand on his head. Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave
permanent marks on me. Other things too. Charlotte once ran away from me outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress
to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-
yellow mark on the palm of my right hand. Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in
reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
The "skin disease" which Seymour sees himself afflicted with in 1942 apparently becomes worse. By 1948, the date of
his suicide, the "lemon-yellow marks" have attained weight and shape; he has become mortally ill.
During the course of his interlude with the little girl on the beach in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," he says to her:
"You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish. This is a perfect day for bananafish."

"I don't see any," Sybil said.
"That's understandable. Their habits are very peculiar.... They lead a very tragic life.... You know what they do, Sybil?"

She shook her head.
"Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But
once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as
seventy-eight bananas.... Naturally after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the
door."

... "What happens to them?"
... "Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die."
"Why?" asked Sybil.
"Well, they get banana fever. It's a terrible disease."
In other words, Seymour, a bananafish himself, has become so glutted with sensation that he cannot swim out into
society again. It is his own banana fever, not his wife who is at fault, or his mother-in-law. If they are stupid and


insensitive, "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters" shows them also to be without malice, and hence basically as
inculpable for the bananafish's condition as is the Matron of Honor, who represents the whole level-headed society in
criticizing Seymour for his peccadilloes....
In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," [Salinger's] awareness that his hero is "diseased" is still intuitive, I think. Although
the "bananafish" metaphor is brilliant in itself, the insight is somewhat neutralized by Salinger's apparent blame of the
wife and the mother-in-law for Seymour's suicide. The two women are, at any rate, mercilessly satirized in the telephone
conversation through the mother-in-law's constant interruption of the impassioned discussion of Seymour's perilous
mental health with questions like "How's your blue coat?" and "How's your ballerina?" As a result, Seymour seems ... a
victim of an external force, namely, the bourgeois matriarchy.... When the important bananafish symbol arrives later in
the story, it is impossible to do much with it. There is no demonstrated connection between society's insensitivity and
Seymour's zaniness.
The problem recurs again in the next story, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," but not without growing evidence that
Salinger is ready to resist the easy answer that the bouregoisie and/or the war is responsible for the bananafish's
condition. Here, for example, it is quite clear that it is Eloise Wengler's tormenting memories of her lost lover, Walter,
that makes her unable to swim out of the cave into her proper place in Exurbia. Although "the war" is a factor in her
despair since her lover is killed in it, he dies not in battle but in an "absurd" camp accident; likewise, her militantly
bourgeois husband may contribute to her unhappiness, but she is allowed to repay him in kind. No mere victim of
society, Eloise is a bitch, not only with her husband, but with her daughter and her maid as well. She takes the revenges
of an invalid.
This story contains the first clear explanation of banana fever: it is the sense of what is missing that causes the suffering.
Here, the lover's death brings the loss. Death, of course, is the most primitive way of making loss concrete; it is the
villain of [Salinger's early] war stories and it is still the villain here. In "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," however, we have
Salinger's first sign of awareness that this sense of loss ought to be overcome, the first sign, in other words, that
remembering too much is a bad thing. Eloise, for example, resents her daughter's habit of inventing invisible playmates,
Mickey Mickeranno and Jimmy Jimmereeno, to take to bed with her at night. Unconsciously, Eloise knows that Walter,
her lost lover, is as invisible as Ramona's boyfriends. She forces Ramona to move into the middle of the bed to prevent
her daughter from lying with an invisible lover, as she has had to lie with one in the years since Walter's death. She
knows the consequences: her bitchiness.
These "consequences" show that Salinger was not yet willing to settle completely for a story about somebody with
banana fever. In the war, he learned that actions not only had social causes but also social consequences, so he must
indicate that Eloise's unhappiness affects others. In this way he absolved himself from having written an isolated, clinical
report about one of the hyper-sensitive....
In "For Esmewith Love and Squalor" we have an interesting development in the record of the bananafish: Salinger
allows himself his first explicit statement of what is wrong with his heroes. Actually, he allows Dostoievski to make the
statement for him; "Dear God, life is hell ... Fathers and Teachers, I ponder, what is hell? I maintain it is the suffering of
being unable to love." Although Dostoievski's lament probably does not accurately describe Sergeant X's condition, nor
that of Salinger's other heroes for that matter, most of whom love too much; still the God that the Sergeant requires is
clearly a God of redemption, not of justice. What the bananafish needed was to be saved; where justice lay was no longer
certain....
The five stories published since The Catcher in the Rye ("De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," "Teddy," "Franny," "Raise High the
Roofbeam, Carpenters" and "Zooey") explore a solution for the bananafish, first, in terms of union with God and, finally, in
terms of re-union with society.
The stories demonstrate that although the bananafish is incapacitated by the weight of his experience, he is also afflicted
with a psychological conflict between the desire to participate in and the need to withdraw from society. He is a non-
conformist, but a paralyzed one, unlike Arrowsmith, for example, who was moving full-tilt toward a private goal, or
Huckleberry Finn, who was making his precipitate escape away from society, unwilling to be captured. The Salinger


hero, on the other hand, is carried along in the currents of his own psyche, neither toward nor away from anything. He
drifts in a course more or less parallel to that of society, alternately tempted and repelled, half inclined to participate, and
half inclined to withdraw.
In "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," the miracle regeneration of "For Esme" recurs, this time in terms of a frankly
mystical Experience. Salinger himself, only half ironically, uses the capital "e" to describe it, perhaps to indicate that it
takes a momentary union with God in order to achieve a real insight into a man's relationship with his fellows.
The reconciliation to the idea of participation without illusion is pushed to fantastic new extremes in "Teddy," in some
ways Salinger's most unexpected story. In "Teddy," reconciliation becomes Oriental resignation. The transition from the
personal mysticism to the formal Eastern self-immolation which Teddy practices does not occur, however, without
certain schizophrenic symptoms in both the form of the story and in its main character. It is the only one of Salinger's
stories that is utterly incredible, and yet he goes to his usual pains to document its reality.
What Teddy, this ten-year-old Buddha, has achieved in Salinger's bargain with the East is, of course, invulnerability, the
persistent wish of all bananafish. The knowledge that De Daumier-Smith comes to by hard Experience, Teddy is granted
early through mystic revelation. He then withdraws, as all great religious figures have, to be better able to participate. In
Teddy's case, he removes himself from the boorish concerns of a society represented by his father and sister in order
that he may be invulnerable to the malice of his father and sister, and be able to do good in return. He writes in his diary,
for example: "See if you can find daddy's army dog tags and wear them whenever possible. It won't kill you and he will
like it."
The recent publication of "Franny" revived the dilemma of participation or withdrawal. Here, the Zen-Buddhist material
is not as well integrated on a story level as in "Teddy," since Franny merely wishes to believe in a way of living the
validity of which Teddy has had satisfactory mystic revelation. But because the tension is more psychological in
"Franny," and because God is sought this side of oblivion, it is a more touching story.
In the main scene in the restaurant with her boyfriend, Franny is graphically split between the desire to withdraw and the
need to participate. She has arrived to spend the weekend with Lane, already apprehensive that she will find the kind of
insensitivity she has found in him many times before. She would like to be the good-time girl that Lane wants, but this
time she cannot bear his egocentricity, his counterfeit participation in the world. She retreats to the stall in the Ladies'
Room to weep for him and for all the others, one presumes, who, like Lane, are devoted to the Flaubertian view of
society, that mean focus on personal vanity, which so offends Franny. Franny, a bananafish, sees all the beautiful
possibilities instead, and she suffers for it. She tries to communicate with him again, finally withdraws once more and
falls insensible to the ground. Her courage, however, has touched something in the boy at last. After her final collapse,
he is kind to her, half understanding, but she ends making her final whispered appeal to God.
Pity for the bananafish ends with "Franny." The function of Salinger's two most recent stories, both long, didactic, and
largely unsymmetrical, is to restore the stature of the bananafish. In "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters," he removes
the shame from the disease by showing Seymour Glass as a superior man. In "Zooey," he shows that reconciliation with
society is possible if the bananafish, with courage, practices the act of Christian love.
"Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters" affirms the bananafish in spite of the fact that the reader knows that Seymour
Glass is to end as Teddy did, embracing death. Its very title, first of all, is a paean for the bridegroom, a singularly
appropriate symbol for all the Salinger heroes, who are young people, people uninitiated, unconsummated,
unassimilated. The story thus is a celebration of experiences, rather than a dirge for them. Moreover, it celebrates for the
first time, the sensitivity of the hero, marking perhaps a final surrender of the author's identification with the hero and a
beginning of appreciation for him. If Seymour is a sick man, he is also a big man and that becomes an important thing
here.
While the story explains the suicide of Seymour in "Bananafish," it also makes that suicide seem a little irrelevant. It is
Seymour's life, his unique way of looking at things that concerns Salinger here, and although he is obliged to mention the
subsequent death of Seymour early in the story, he refers to it simply as "death," rather than suicide. For a change, the


remark seems incidental, rather than a calculated understatement, the device Salinger consistently uses when he talks
about what touches him particularly.
Concerned with Seymour's life rather than his death, Salinger is at last able to expose the bananafish here. Banana fever
no longer seems the shame that it did in "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," "The Laughing Man," "For Esmewith
Love and Squalor," and in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" itself where Seymour can express himself only to a little girl,
and ambiguously at that. The secretly prying eyes of others he is unable to bear. Witness the curious scene on the
elevator when he accuses a woman in the car of staring at his feet. This happens less than a minute before he puts a
bullet through his head.
In "Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters," the frank advocacy of Seymour enables Salinger to transcend the limits of
the tight pseudo-poetic structure which hamstrings so much of modern short fiction. Because the story is partisan, it
must be analytic as well as metaphoric. No longer deceived into thinking his characters are prey to simple grief or to
bourgeois insensitivity, rather than to beauty, he is able to expose them at last. The loosening of form, which begins with
"For Esmewith Love and Squalor," culminates with Seymour's throwing the stone at Charlotte, the affirmation of the
effort for expression and communication even at the expense of exposure and pain.
Finally, it takes Zooey, in the story which bears his name, to communicate the new awareness and to act upon it. The
redeeming union with the divine is the same as union with society, Zooey believes. If Buddy remains unreconstructable,
Zooey, the youngest Glass son, comes to recognize that to be a deaf-mute in a high silk hat or a catcher in the rye is not
the privilege of many.
Essentially, Zooey is a man of action. Appropriately enough, his profession is acting. Although he does not care much
for a great deal of the world, he participates in it. He performs in television scripts which he detests; he meets people for
lunch he does not like; he argues with his mother; he challenges his sister; he even dares to deface the shrine of the long-
dead Seymour. In none of these things is he remotely self-immolating or contemplative, in the manner of Teddy; in none
of them does he seek an "affinity." It is suggested that it is because Zooey alone among the Glasses has "forgiven"
Seymour for his suicide that he is enabled to take a more involving and distinctly Western view of society. Zooey's final
advice to his sister Franny, who has had aspirations to the stage, is: "The only thing you can do now, the only religious
thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want tobe God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at
least try to, if you want tothere's nothing wrong in trying."
Action then is the remedy here, and although remedies come and go in Salinger, it is perhaps most important because
when action becomes an end in itself, it becomes possible to distinguish again between the deed and the doer. Zooey
remonstrates with Franny about it: " ... what I don't likeand what I don't think either Seymour or Buddy would like
either, as a matter of factis the way you talk about all these people. I mean you just don't despise what they represent
you despise them. It's too damn personal, Franny. I mean it." Zooey's aim is to recognize that principles exist by which
men live; and that without action, things are neither good nor bad. Principles vanish. The bananafish's mind is full of still
photographs; action thaws these photographs; action again makes judgments possible. It forestalls the rapt
contemplation of moments that have no meaning to others and which tend to isolate each individual in his own picture
gallery. To transcend the particular for the sake of the general is to overcome the paralyzed moment for the sake of the
principle which animates it.
Although this is a new step for Salinger, one must observe that throughout the story, he keeps Buddy's opinion in
abeyance. In the speech quoted above, Zooey suggests that Buddy and Seymour agree with him about the distinction
between the deed and the doer. But the shadow of Buddy and Seymour would suggest otherwise. Zooey's consent to
participate is as much rebellion from as it is practice of the way of life of his older brothers. As a matter of cold fact,
principles have always gotten in the way for the bananafish because principles, ideas, systems are too far away from life
as the bananafish lives it. That is why every participation in the social system has turned out to be counterfeit in the
end....
Source Citation:


Wiegand, William. "J. D. Salinger: Seventy-Eight Bananas." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student

Additional material:
The New Yorker, January 31, 1948, pages 21-25
Also known as: "Bananafish"
Also known as: "A Great Day for a Bananafish"

Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume(s) 3:444; 12:499, 503, 514, 520; 56:324, 352; 138:183, 198-99, 201,
204, 214, 216
World Literature Criticism, volume(s) 5:3019-21, 3023-25
Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 2:290-93, 295, 297-99, 303, 305, 308, 312, 314, 318; 28:229, 236-38, 243, 263,
265-66; 65:292, 294, 304-6, 308-10, 318, 321, 335, 337-38
Short Stories for Students, volume(s) 17: 233-254


J. D. Salinger

"J. D. Salinger," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 102: American Short Story Writers, 1910-1945, Gale
Research Inc., 1991, pp. 258-65.
[In the following excerpt, Stevick discusses the development, style, and content of Salinger's short stories.]
The entire body of writing by which Jerome David Salinger wishes to be known is contained in four small booksone
novel and thirteen short stories. All of these were published in the eleven-and-a-half years between January 1948 and
June 1959; and all but the novel and two of the stories originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Yet despite this
limited body of work, Salinger remained for at least a dozen years, from 1951 to 1963, the most popular American
fiction writer with serious high-school and college students, as well as many adults alienated by the stultifying conformity
of the Eisenhower years; and his few publications elicited an enormous body of criticism. Few writers have developed
such a major reputation for such a small body of work, largely from a single magazine noted for its rigid formulae and
chic appeal to the highly educated, upper middle class (especially since Salinger's fiction is notable for its unwavering
attack on the life-style of the highly educated, urban, upper middle class). Only Salinger's last few published stories were
notable for their controversial, anti-narrative structures; the novel and other stories are exemplary of the brisk, ironic
"New Yorker style," used by other writers such as John O'Hara and John Cheever; but all Salinger's work is remarkable
for his command of the brisk, nervous, defensive speech of young, upper-middle-class Manhattanites. His work is a
unique phenomenon, important as the voice of a "silent generation" in revolt against a "phony world" and in search of
mystical escapes from a deteriorating society rather than "causes" promising political revolution or reform.
Salinger was born and grew up in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, the son of a prosperous Jewish
importer and his Scotch-Irish wife. In one of the few interviews he has granted, he said that his own childhood was
much like that of the boy Holden Caulfield in his novel The Catcher in the Rye, though Salinger had only one sister. Like
Holden, he was restless in fashionable prep schools, and he was finally sent to Valley Forge Military Academy, a model
for Pencey Prep in his novel. Here and at nearby Ursinus College, which he attended briefly, he worked for literary
magazines and wrote movie reviews. Subsequently a class in short story writing at Columbia University under Whit
Burnett, founder-editor of the influential Story Magazine, in which many mid-century fiction writers were first published,
led to his own earliest commercial publications in this magazine. He quickly graduated to the well-paying "slick"
magazines of the periodCollier's, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and, at last, the New
Yorker. To the first five of these and some other publications, Salinger contributed between 1941 and 1948 twenty stories
that he has since 1954 refused to allow to be republished. (There does exist a pirated edition of them: The Complete
Uncollected Stories of J. D. Salinger, 2 vols. [1974].) Most of these are very short, highly colloquial, sentimental, yet heavily
ironic tales in the manner made popular by O. Henry. Many of them are the very popular "short, short stories" with a
surprise ending that could be printed on a single page, although one, "The Inverted Forest," is a novelette of
considerable complexity with an ambiguous ending. Several of these stories are about draftees in the army during World
War II and reflect Salinger's own service between 1942 and 1945 in the Army Signal Corps and the Counter-Intelligence
Corps.
After the war, Salinger published in the New Yorker a short story, "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," subsequently revised
for inclusion in The Catcher in the Rye; the work by which he wishes to be known began, however, with his second
contribution to the magazine, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," an enormously popular story about the suicide of
Seymour Glass, who first appears in this story.
Salinger perhaps wishes his early stories hidden away because they are apprentice work; he may be embarrassed by their
slickness. A few are interesting because they introduce an earlier conception of Holden Caulfield as a rebellious young
soldier who is killed in World War II; but only "The Inverted Forest" really adds anything to Salinger's stature. This is
the story of a writer who "can't stand any kind of inventiveness" and his pathetic difficulties in dealing with doting and
exploitative womenmother, patron, wife, and mistress. Salinger never again so specifically allegorizes the view that the
artist has no obligations to society as in this caustic story of a sorely-pressed individual who withdraws from a
meretricious world to live entirely within "the inverted forest" of his own imaginationan outlook that Salinger rejects


in his later stories. Only some early chapters of The Catcher in the Rye and the short story "Pretty Mouth and Green My
Eyes" among his collected works picture people without spiritual moorings in a plastic, materialistic world.
The major reason for Salinger's rejecting these early stories is that they do not reflect the Hindu-Buddhist influences that
begin to color his work in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which Salinger begins to depict escape from the "phony"
world as not defeat, but triumph for the sensitive individual. His work thereafter can most rewardingly be perceived as
colloquial, contemporary American versions of the ko-ans (cryptic object lessons) of the Zen Buddhist tradition.
By narrowing attention, then, to the novel and thirteen chosen stories, this whole body of work can be seenlike such
other American classics as Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Thomas Wolfe's Eugene Gant/George Webber novel-cycle
as parts of a single statement, the theme of which is announced in the climactic moment in the last of these stories as
Buddy Glass explains his older brother Seymour's suicide: "I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and
does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred
human conscience."
Salinger's epic of the journey of the human spirit through the illusions of the material world to the transcendent spiritual
Oneness beyond, which might be called "The Caulfield/Glass Saga," begins, chronologically, with a still controversial,
description of Seymour Glass's activities on the day of his suicide amidst the unparalleled vulgarities of Miami Beach,
Florida, and ends with his disciple-brother's explanation of this action and of the unique importance of the "artist-seer."
The rambling, seemingly structureless "Seymour: An Introduction" that still bothers plot-oriented readers can most
satisfactorily be appreciated as Buddy Glass's petition for the sainthood of his brother by some unworldly body of right-
thinking people. Seymour is indeed "a fool"not only in the eyes of conventional, money-grubbing people, but in his
own because of his romantic susceptibilitiesbut he does create and inspire beauty, and he does end this mortal life
rather than compromise his integrity.
Using Buddy's pronouncement to make a division, a distinction can be made among Salinger's works between the stories
of those who refuse to betray their sacred consciences and those who do compromise reluctantly in order to fulfill what
they regard as their obligations in a conscienceless world. On the one side may be placed "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish," "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," "Teddy," "Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters," and "Seymour: An
Introduction." On the other there are "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," "The
Laughing Man," "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" and The Catcher in the Rye. In the middleand in the middle of
Salinger's careeris the smallest body of what has generally proved his most admired works, "Down at the Dinghy,"
"For EsmeWith Love and Squalor," and Franny and Zooeysouvenirs of a fleeting time when Salinger apparently
hoped that those not "seers" themselves might learn enough from these mentors to survive in "the waste land" without
becoming contaminated.
As far as the published record goes, this saga began with some trial sketches for The Catcher in the Rye, "I'm Crazy" and
"Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Comparison between the latter and the final version of Holden Caulfield's disastrous
date with Sally Hayes provides the only available opportunity for studying the development in Salinger's writing.
Although it has often been observedeven by Salinger himselfthat there are autobiographical elements in the novel,
they are finally not so important as the fact that The Catcher in the Rye is a story of an urban American middle-class boy
who at the adolescent crisis of his lifethe point at which in a communally ordered society he would undergo
traditional rites of initiation into manhoodchooses, on his own and unguided, an adulterated life in the "real" world
rather than an escape from it.
Holden is aware of the options, because his younger brother Allie, who wrote Emily Dickinson's poems on his baseball
mitt, has escaped (though through disease not choice), and his older brother, an artist but no seer, has prostituted
himself to Hollywood. When Holden fears that he may "disappear" himself, he prays to his personal saint Allie to
preserve him. Holden persists in living because, despite his frustrations in the "phony" world, he still has a naive sense of
mission: in the famous passage that gives the novel its title he tells his little sister Phoebe, "I keep picturing all these little
kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.... And I'm standing by on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I
have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff." Holden learns that his dream can never be
realized. Watching his little sister ride the carousel in Central Park and grab for the golden ring, he observes, "The thing


with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they
fall but it's bad if you say anything to them."
Even before acquiescing in his inability to arrest the life cycle and hold youth forever innocent, Holden has suffered
another disillusionment. He has dreamed of escaping the city and going West where he could build "a little cabin
somewhere ... and live there for the rest of my life ... near the woods, but not right in them, because I'd want it as sunny
as hell all the time." (This description uncannily foreshadows exactly the kind of place in which Salinger has himself lived
for twenty years now, not in the West, but in New England.) After he finds obscenities scratched, however, even on the
walls of Phoebe's elementary school, he sadly concedes, "You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because
there isn't any."
Rather than being driven out of this world by such disenchantments, Holden assures readers that he did go home after
he felt "so damn happy ... the way old Phoebe kept going around and around" while the carousel played "Smoke Gets in
Your Eyes." He has made this choice after Phoebe pleads to run away with him; he must forego his own escape to do
what he can for her. After this he begins "missing everybody," even those who have hurt him. He is a self-made martyr;
but martyrdom in the "waste land" society means continuing to live, not accepting death. Holden chooses to live in a
decadent society in order to help others live as they wish to live rather than to withdraw in order to preserve his own
scruples or force his own brand of salvation on others. The Catcher in the Rye is a genuine initiation tale, even though it is
only the candidate undergoing the ordeal who is conscious of what his final decision means; the real evidence of the
decadence of his world is that the initiators who impose the ordeals upon him are too much wrapped up in themselves
even to understand the meaning of their actions.
The collected Nine Stories, by way of contrast, ultimately climaxes in not the acceptance but the transcendence of this
world. Although the stories involve different characters, they may also be read collectively as the dramatization of a
progressive action, so that they exemplify what Forest Ingram calls a "short-story cycle": "a book of short stories so
linked to each other by their author that the reader's successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole
significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts." The links between the stories in this cycle,
however, do not result in the kind of narrative progression based on physical growth that we find in James Joyce's
Dubliners, John Steinbeck's The Red Pony, or Dylan Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, but rather a progression
based upon spiritual enlightenment, something like the believer experiences in the Christian ritual of the Stations of the
Cross or, more appropriately, the stages that the neophyte passes through in his apprehension of Zen. What is
represented through this group of stories that were publishedand apparently writtenin the order of their
presentation is the purification of the ego by the passage of the soul through an intensifying series of the torments of the
hell of this mortal world to the ego-free state in which one has at last achieved total unity with the infinite so that the
individual life-form no longer mattersthe one has been absorbed into the One.
Humayun Mirza has provided the clue that has long been needed to make possible a fully coherent experience of this
story-cycle in his perception that, despite the meaning of Seymour Glass's example and teachings to his sibling/disciples,
Seymour isfrom the Hindu viewa false guru (teacher), because he has not been able to transcend the temptations of
mortal flesh. He is like the person that Teddy McArdle (title character of the final one of the nine stories) was in his
previous incarnation. This person "fell from Grace before final illumination" when he met a lady and "sort of stopped
meditating." Teddy in his final incarnation, Mirza demonstrates, is a true guru.
The story-cycle thus moves from the portrayal of the dichotomized saint-in-spirit/satyr-in-the-flesh who must destroy
himself to liberate his tortured conscience/consciousness to the portrayal of a person whose unified mind/body is ready
for the final illumination that will result in his disappearance from the material world through no action of his own, since
he has become too etherealized to persist in it.
"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is thus misread as a moral tale, a satirical attack on our bourgeois culture, or a study of
alienation. It is rather what John Steinbeck might call a "non-teleological" work, a story of what happens to the partially
illuminated person torn between the lustings of his instincts and the dictates of his conscience. The important thing is
that this story starts rather than ends the cycle. Seymour is actually not too advanced for his society, but too primitive for
it. He has the purity of vision of an Old Testament prophet without the sacred purification of Jesus or Buddha. He is


even less sophisticated than Holden Caulfield; he is not able to adjust to his society, but neither can he transcend it
without violence.
The successive stories through "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," then, represent the successive stages in the
adjustment to this society that Seymour cannot make, though the central characters also progressively lose their purity of
vision, the innocence that Wordsworth in "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" describes the child as bringing with him
as he enters this world "trailing clouds of glory."
The next story in the cycle, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," offers in a few pages the most clearly contrasting views of
the "nice" and "phony" worlds that we find anywhere in Salinger's writing. Eloise, the principal character, has glimpses
of the sacred world in which Seymour Glass yearns to live, but she is too mired in the phony world of Connecticut to
free herself; she can only break out finally in the Wordworthian cry, "I was a nice girl ... wasn't I?" She is in much the
same state that Holden Caulfield appears to be at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, although Holden has "grown up"
enough to resemble more closely the sentimental Ginnie Maddox of the third story of the cycle, "Just Before the War
with the Eskimos," who has become enough at home in the "phony world" to be able to make the generous gestures
that elude the still embittered Eloise.
"The Laughing Man" presents a central figure another step removed from Seymour's neurotic perfectionism, another
step closer to being able to make practical gestures to comfort others even in the midst of his own despair. When this
"Chief" terrifies his young listeners/acolytes by letting the legendary laughing man of his seemingly endless episodic tale
tear off his poppy-petal mask and die, he seems to be spitefully taking out his rage at a frustrated love affair on his
helpless charges; but, paradoxically, his action is in their best interests, for the immediate pain of disillusionment is better
than prolonged existence in a fantasy world that the Chief now knows must some day be dispelled painfully. But he is
not yet a master of reconciliation; his technique is crude and abrupt.
The master is Boo-Boo Tannenbaum, one of Seymour Glass's two sisters. In "Down at the Dinghy," her son Lionel has
cruelly had his illusions shattered at an even earlier age than the Chief's charges in "The Laughing Man." (Just what ails
Lionel remains obscure; the story focuses on Boo-Boo's techniques.) Tactfully and with utmost patience rather than
even well-intended harshness, Boo-Boo ends her son's attempt to withdraw from an intolerable adult world by making
him accept its imperfect realities.
The master of reconciliation, the maker of as much happiness as we can ever know in the "phony world," is that proper
young British girl who lends her name to the title of a great modern epithalamion, "For EsmeWith Love and Squalor."
Esme is able to readjust not just a young relative, but a grown man who much resembles Seymour Glass. When Sergeant
X, as this character is mysteriously identified, is in Germany on the verge of a nervous breakdown after observing
incredibly squalid examples of the behavior of both Hitler's Nazi minions and his boorish American fellows-in-arms, he
regains his "faculties" as he receives Esme's gift of her father's wristwatch with the crystal broken and the news that she
is teaching her affectionate little brother to read and write. Esme's spontaneous generosity is as much communion as we
can expect to experience in this hellish life; but it is important to contemplate the nature of her gifta timepiece with the
transparent crystal smashed. The attempted gift of time, like the unequivocal gift of letters to her little brother, shows
that Esme, for all her radiance, is completely of this linear world. Her joys are family and marriage; she has no perception
of the timeless realm of Teddy McArdle.
The temporal equilibrium that Esme achieves cannot endure. This is just what happens in the plunge from the ecstatic
hiIGHS of "For Esme" into the depths of Salinger's darkest, most cynical story, "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," in
which a naive young man desperate for success is driven to lie about his wife's behavior to the very senior member of his
law firm who is in fact cuckolding him. His spiritual death is signaled by his recognition that the wife's eyes are not
actually as he had fancied "green," emblematic of youth and vitality, but "like goddam sea shells." No single recent story
better illustrates the line from T. S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion," "What is kept must be adulterated."
Many modern short-story cycles might have ended here, as James Joyce's Dubliners does, for example, with the
completion of a movement from life-in-death to death-in-life. "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" reaches the lowest pit
of modern urban hell; there is no exit from here except into the extinguishing darkness of Samuel Beckett's Endgameor


upward by a surge of spirit into an entirely other world. One of Salinger's least comprehended stories, the genuinely
mystical "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," makes this leap, and in so doing most conspicuously calls attention to the
architectonics of Nine Stories. De Daumier-Smith is the first, actually the only character in Salinger's work to
experiencebefore the reader's eyes (Teddy's illumination has preceded our acquaintance with him)a "liminal
moment," an illumination on the threshold between the sensible and supersensible.
This vain artist from a decadent background has become a teacher in a correspondence-course art school and begins to
try to manage his students' lives, especially that of a talented but unself-conscious nun. He lives above an orthopedic
appliances shop; gazing in its window, he recognizes that "no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully" he might learn
to live, he "would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans.... " One day, however, as he
makes a friendly gesture to an attendant in the window, "Suddenly ... the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of
[his] nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second." He is blinded, and when his sight returns the girl is gone,
"leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers." He goes home and notes in his
diary, "I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everybody is a nun."
Scarcely another scene in literature makes so explicit the "dazzling" experience that Buddy Glass attributes to the "artist-
seer." For De Daumier-Smith, however, this is only a transient experience; he returns to the great American sport of girl-
watching. He is not ready to make the final, permanent move into the enamel world that Teddy does in the last story in
the collection.
"Teddy" is Salinger's one story whose reception he has commented upon through the medium of Buddy Glass. In
"Seymour: An Introduction," Buddy, who has spoken of what are unmistakably other of Salinger's earlier stories as his
own, mentions "an exceptionally Haunting, Memorable, unpleasantly controversial, and thoroughly unsuccessful short
story about a `gifted' little boy aboard a transatlantic liner." The story has indeed proved controversial, for critics still
quarrel over whether Teddy at the end jumps into an empty swimming pool or is pushed in by his spiteful little sister.
Salinger has never explained why the story was "unsuccessful," but it is probably largely because readers failed to
comprehend that Teddy was but a passive agent in his fate. The clue to the conclusion is his suggestion to his parents at
the beginning of the story that "after I get out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances." When an
inquisitive schoolteacher asks Teddy if he has any emotions, the boy replies, "If I do, I don't remember when I ever used
them.... I don't see what they're good for." He has become detached from both the feelings of frustration that most of
Salinger's other characters feel and even the feelings of joy that Esme induces and that De Daumier-Smith discovers.
Teddy is no longer a part of this neurotic world, so that he is ready to depart from itbut his departure is no tragedy.
Rather, since he has attained spiritual truth, his is a divine comedy. If he did not resist "dematerialization," however,
neither would hefree of emotionshave taken any action of the kind that Seymour Glass did to destroy himself.
Nine Stories thus carries us through a series of emblematic tableaux of human spiritual evolutionfrom an opening
portrait of a seer whose spiritual insight has completely outstripped his physical discipline, through the stages as one
loses internal vision to gain external control of his body and emotions and then is projected suddenly into a spiritual
development that provides momentary insights of timelessness, until one is absorbed altogether into the infinite. These
stories should not be read, however, as models for behavior, but as what James Joyce called "epiphanies" of
manifestations of behavior at typical stages in the human fall from glory and reascension back into it.
Franny and Zooey marks a movement beyond the creation of this static portrait gallery, perhaps even a presumptuous one.
In the first of these two linked stories, Seymour Glass's youngest sibling Franny has grownlike Holden Caulfield
impatient and disgusted with the meretriciousness of life in the success-seeking world and yearns to move toward
spiritual purification by repeating the "Jesus Prayer" continually. She succeeds only in driving herself into a nervous
breakdown. In the sequel, her brother Zooey attempts to enlighten her by making her see that she is reacting against the
egotism she despises with what is only another form of egotism: "You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday,
but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even
move an inch." She has been protesting the "unskilled laughter" of the audience; but Zooey, in his summoning up of a
grotesque "Fat Lady," who is actually "Christ himself," tells her that depressing as the audience's reaction may be, it's
none of her business: "An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone
else's." Zooey thus does advocate living humbly in this world, as Holden Caulfield had apparently determined to do; and


by masquerading as Seymour during a phone call to Franny, he apparently succeeds in tranquilizing her into this
acceptance, too.
Actually one of the last two stories collected, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" had originally appeared between
the separate publications of "Franny" and "Zooey," but it belongs with the final story, "Seymour: An Introduction," as
part of Salinger's evocation through the medium of Buddy Glass of the artist whose only concern indeed is "to shoot for
some kind of perfection," on his own terms.
That Salinger's vision of Seymour had changed from 1948 to 1959 is suggested by Buddy's observation in "Seymour: An
Introduction" that the "Seymour" of the earlier story "was not Seymour at all but, oddly, someone with a striking
resemblance toalley oop, I'm afraidmyself." Coupled with the comments about the unsuccessfulness of "Teddy,"
this concessionfollowing Salinger's own successful withdrawal from the "phony world" of The Catcher in the Rye
suggests that Salinger had begun to have a much more favorable impression of Seymour than when he wrote "A Perfect
Day for Bananafish." Since Teddy's emotionless purity seemed beyond readers' comprehensions, they might identify
more closely with a spiritually superior person who shares their own fleshly frailties. In "Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters," Buddy begins by saying of Seymour that, since his death, "I haven't been able to think of anybody whom
I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead," and in "Seymour: An Introduction," he goes on to say, "We have
had only three or four very nearly non-expendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few." The
curious form of the latter story, in which Buddy seeks to form an alliance with the reader against "the middle-aged hot-
rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the
Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists..." also suggests that these later Glass stories are attempts to
convert readers through an embryonic saint's legend. (Buddy describes Seymour as "the only person I've habitually
consorted with ... who more frequently than not tallied with the classical conception, as I saw it, of a mukta, a ringding
enlightened man, a God-knower.") The detachment of Nine Stories has been supplanted by a skillfully manipulated
conversion technique. As a result, perhaps, of his own successful retreat from the world, Salinger had achieved a kind of
peace that made him feel that the artist did have something more timely to do than point to Teddy McArdle's merger with
the infinite as the culmination of man's incarnations.
He may have changed his mind again, if one can trust the limited evidence of his most recent uncollected story,
"Hapworth 16, 1924," which consists mostly of a letter that Seymour writes home from summer camp at the age of
seven. This letter testifies to the prodigious learning that would make Seymour the star of a 1930s children's quiz
program, but it evidences also a prodigious sexuality that reinforces the early picture in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
of the failed guru. If Salinger has swung back to a heightened appreciation of the timeless, egoless state achieved by
Teddy McArdle, he has not chosen to let us know. In the one interview that he has granted in recent years (in a
telephone call to San Francisco, primarily to protest the unauthorized publishing of his early stories in a collected
edition), he reported that he was still writing furiously, but that he views publication as a "terrible invasion" of his
privacy. He chooses to live isolated in New Hampshire, perhaps sustained by his view of the solitary splendor of
neighboring Mount Ascutney.
Salinger was little known when The Catcher in the Rye was published; and the novel was not outstandingly acclaimed by
reviewers, most of them sounding variations on Ernest Jones's theme that, although the novel was "a case history of all
of us," it was "predictable and boring." Its reputation grew slowly by word of mouth, especially among college students
and teachers; but little serious attention was paid to Salinger until after the publication of Nine Stories and "Franny." In
1956 and 1957 the first serious essays by respected scholarsEdgar M. Branch, Arthur Heiserman, James E. Miller, Jr.,
and Charles Kaplanappeared, linking the novel to traditional quest myths and particularly to Mark Twain's Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn. For the next six years, the flood of articles rose constantly, until George Steiner denounced "The
Salinger Industry" for promoting Salinger to greatness for his competent rendering of "the semi-literate maunderings of
the adolescent mind."
There were other skeptics: John W. Aldridge included an influential misreading of Catcher in In Search of Heresy; Leslie
Fiedler said that Salinger and Jack Kerouac echoed not "the tragic Huckleberry Finn, but the sentimental book with which
it is intertwined"; Frank Kermode supposed that Holden's attitudes pleased academics who shared these views that they
could not openly express; Mary McCarthy belittled Salinger's obsessive affection for his own creations.


Many of Salinger's defenders, like Dan Wakefield and Christopher Parker, were sentimental and childishly hysterical; but
a body of solid work began to appear with Donald Costello's study of Salinger's language, Carl Strauch's structural
analysis of Catcher, and William Wiegand's sound analyses of the relationship of Salinger's art to modern Western
philosophy. A landmark was Ihab Hassan's choice of Salinger as one of the four principal postwar fictionists in the
pioneering study of the period, Radical Innocence (1961).
The peak came in 1962-1963, which saw the publication of six collections of essays about Salinger and the first book-
length monograph about his work. This formidable array proved a turning point, however, coinciding, as it accidentally
did, with the publication of what remains so far the last of his own books. Gradually at first, then dramatically, after
1963, new critical studies tapered off, while sales of the works themselves slowed.
Because of his lack of interest in political reforms and the passivity and escapism of his leading characters, Salinger did
not appeal to young readers during the activist years of the late 1960s and early 1970s as he had earlier to members of
the "silent generation" that identified with Holden Caulfield. It appears that what stands as the finest appreciation of this
novelist by a distinguished American scholar, James E. Miller, Jr.'s pamphlet, J. D. Salinger (1965), might remain the last
word on the man who possessed the singular ability to embody fictionally the alienated sensibility of the youth of a
decade. Miller concludes that Salinger deserves "a place in the first rank, and even, perhaps, the preeminent position" in
post-World War II American fiction.
Since then, however, there has been a rediscovery of Salinger as a writer of unique importance on different grounds.
Although lately arrived critics continue to rush into print with the news that Salinger is a spokesman for America's
alienated adolescents, and although some mention of the influence of Asian thought upon his writings may be found in
even early criticisms, only with the elementary explanations that Bernice and Sanford Goldstein began to publish in 1966
have the influences of Zen Buddhism on Salinger's work been illustrated in detail. The first full accountings of the
considerable extent of his use of oriental thought from a variety of sources appear in Humayun Mirza's dissertation and
John Antush's book. The best recent essays about Salinger are by new enthusiasts such as Robert Coles and Ernest
Ranly, who stress both the way in which a growing interest in Asian thought in the West has led readers back through "a
passage to India" to Salinger and the way in which his colloquial embodiments of these ancient speculations have
subconsciously implanted them into the minds of sensitive young Americans appalled by the increasing "phoniness" of
their own materialistic culture.
Now that the early clamor over his works (including some censorious attacks upon its improprieties) has subsided, there
seems little argument that Salinger, especially in The Catcher in the Rye, "Franny," and the more worldly of the Nine Stories,
is unchallenged for having embedded in the amber of art the "bugs" of the depressingly paranoid McCarthy/Eisenhower
years. But there is also growing evidence that his works are not just static museum pieceslike those that Holden
Caulfield admires. Interest in oriental philosophies has been growing rapidly in America in recent years as we have
achieved insights into their universality. Increasingly Salinger is winning recognition and acclaim as a writer thoroughly
steeped in the manners and mannerisms of his own culture, who has deeply enough absorbed this traditional wisdom
from the East to be able to use it artfully in shaping legends that enable readers to appreciate through familiar icons the
meaning of esoteric doctrines. Like the Phoenix of Eastern mythology, Salinger has risen from the ashes of his own
timely reputation to assume what may prove a timeless one.
Source Citation:
Stevick, Philip. "J. D. Salinger." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold.



J. D. Salinger: The Mirror of Crisis

"J. D. Salinger: The Mirror of Crisis," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 184, No. 10, March 9, 1957, pp. 215-17.
[In an overview of Salinger's fiction, Stevenson suggests that Salinger's short stories are powerful because they accurately
reflect the emotional predicament of men and women in modern society.]
Because of [his] diffidence to things dedicatedly literary, Salinger is usually identified by book reviewers, and properly, as
a New Yorker writer, implying thereby both city wit and surface brilliance in his use of prose and stylized irony of
situation in his use of plot....
Salinger is surely one of the most skillful practitioners of the New Yorker short story or sketch. And, invidious critics
aside, his sketches show it to be, at its best, one of the truly distinctive and definable fictional types of mid-century
American letters. This kind of story contains no more than two or three characters, seen always at a moment of crisis in
one of their lives. The concentration is on the crisis: the relationships which have led to it are indistinct, only suggested
by the tone of the dialogue, by characters' momentary actions and gestures. The Salinger-New Yorker story is always a
kind of closet scene between Hamlet and his mother with the rest of the play left out. It accomplishes its shock of
surprise, and it evokes our emotions, by a frugal underplaying of plot and event, by its very minimizing of narrative. The
reader is usually not projected into the problems of its characters because he is not given enough of the fabric of their
lives to make such projection possible.
What a Salinger story does involve the reader in is something quite different. It is his awareness that the crisis of the
sketch is a generic one of our time and place. The crisis of the usual New Yorker story may be fairly casual, and we have
come to expect a Salinger story to be more stern in its implications because its roots are stronger and probe more deeply.
But its crisis runs true to form. Salinger does not take you out of yourself into a living, substantial world of fiction. He
throws you back into your own problems, or into an awareness of them in your contemporaries. His characters do not
exist in a rich narrative, in a detailed setting, so that they become wholly separable, fictional beings. Rather they give us a
feeling of our own sensitivity to compensate for their lack of created density.
One can best illustrate this quality of a Salinger story by comparing his New Yorker sketch "Pretty Mouth and Green My
Eyes" [from Nine Stories] with Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." The two stories offer the
same basic character relationships: passively suffering husband, aggressively lustful wife, and casual, opportunistic lover.
In Hemingway's version, however, the characters are embedded in a full, complex plot in which motive and event are
made inexorably overt. The tensions of the characters are in open balance for the reader, and the husband's declared
failure of nerve is what provokes his wife's ruthless retaliation in taking a lover. The Macombers exist in the round as
"created" individuals in a self-contained narrative which could be translated into mandarin and remain comprehensible.
Part of the virtue of "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," on the other hand, is that it is not a self-contained narrative.
We know of the characters only that they are apartment dwellers in New York. They exist as voices on a telephone to
illustrate the desperate irony of a husband calling his wife's latest lover, after a party the three of them have attended, at
the moment when the lover is in bed with the wife. The tearing crisis of the story is the husband's slow realization, as he
complains in hideously maudlin, drunken terms of his wife's infidelities, that he has put his own self-respect beyond the
point of salvage. Salinger's characters, here, come alive New Yorker fashion through the skillful verisimilitude of their
conversation.... They are important to us in direct proportion to our recognition of them as generic sketches of our
urban, childless, apartmented men and women, alienated by the hectic nature of their lives from all quiet interflow of
love and affection.
One significant element in the structure of a Salinger story, then, and a source of his power over us, is that his characters
come alive in our recognition of them. In complementary fashion, an equally significant element is the effect on us of
the special kind of crisis he asks us to identify. As in "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," it is a crisis in a character's life


that results from an erosion of personality peculiar to upper middle-class, mid-century America. It is related to our sense
of the heightened vulnerability of men and women to emotional disaster.
I am not prepared to argue that the Salinger species of crisis is unique, and that other ages did not feel themselves
alienated from inner security and outward affection. Hamlet alone would suffice. I should only assert that in our time and
place, the individual estranged from his fellows seems peculiarly understandable and therefore touching to us....
Salinger's short stories are all variations on the theme of emotional estrangement. In "Down at the Dinghy," a small boy
runs away when he overhears his father referred to as a "kike." In "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," two women,
unsuccessful adventurers in love, let a Connecticut afternoon drift away on highballs and reminiscences, while the timid
child of one of them retreats farther and farther into compensatory fantasy as the two women get progressively more
sodden. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" a young soldier released from an army hospital confronts his wife's
complicated indifference during their first reunion. When he is forced to weigh a small child's warm, intuitive sympathy
against his wife's society prettiness, he shoots himself. The actions of the characters in all these stories could seem
arbitrary, judged by the sketchiness of Salinger's narrative. In fact, however, the actions seem real and shocking because
they are the kind of thing we can anticipate from the needs and stresses we share at least in part with the characters....
There is a further fictional device used ... in [Salinger's] short stories.... It is his use of almost Chaplin-like incidents and
dialogue, half-amusing, half-desperate, to keep his story always hovering in ambivalence between comedy and tragedy.
Whenever a character approaches hopelessness in a Salinger sketch, he is getting there by the route of the comic. It is
usually both the character's way of holding on for a moment longer (as when the husband in "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish" goes out of his way to insult a proper dowager just before he kills himself) and, at its sharpest, a way of
dramatic irony, a way of heightening the intensity of a character's predicament (as when Holden [in The Catcher in the Rye]
attempts to be bored with sex to get rid of a prostitute)....
When one is reading Salinger, one accepts his carefully placed "New Yorkerish" style and tone, and surrenders one's
mind almost completely. It is only when you put the story aside and turn to other contemporary writers and to other
fictional methods and techniques that you begin to wonder whether the immediacy and vividness of Salinger might be
limited in power. Nowhere in Salinger do we find ourselves plunged into the emotional coiling and recoiling provoked
by passages from Styron's novel, Lie Down in Darkness. Nowhere in Salinger is a character moved against the murky
intensity-in-depth of a Nelson Algren Chicago scene, in The Man with the Golden Arm. Nowhere is a character revealed by
the great clots of heterogenerous detail yoked together in single crowded sentences, as by Saul Bellow in The Adventures of
Augie March.
But despite the temptations of comparison there remains one's conviction that Salinger is deeply and seriously
committed in his fiction. Further, a little research into the Salinger canon reveals that two of his major creations, Holden
Caulfield and Seymour Glass, the young husband of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," have deep roots in Salinger's own
imagination. His novel, in its way, is as much a final version of "work in progress" as are the novels of his more literary
contemporaries, pulled together from fragmentary excursions as short stories in Partisan Review, in Hudson Review, in New
World Writing. Only with Salinger, the professional, early sketches of Holden Caulfield occur in a series of stories
published in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and in the New Yorker, in the years 1944-1946. And Seymour Glass turns
out to have rich interconnections in Salinger's mind with the uncle of the runaway boy of "Down at the Dinghy," with
the older brother of the heroine in a sketch "Franny," and with the bridegroom in a novelette "Raise High the Roof
Beam, Carpenters."
This extrinsic information helps verify one's feeling that there is actually more weight to his explorations of human
alienation than his bright dialogue and his frugal use of background and event might suggest. Moreover, Salinger's non-
literary status leaves him, as a serious writer, almost unique as a wholly free agent, unhampered by the commitments of
his more dedicated contemporaries to one or another school of critics. One might guess that this is Salinger's most
precious asset. Rather than wishing quarterly significance or "greatness" on him, we can be content to take him for what
he is: a beautifully deft, professional performer who gives us a chance to catch quick, half-amused, half-frightened
glimpses of ourselves and our contemporaries, as he confronts us with his brilliant mirror images....


Source Citation:
Stevenson, David L. "J. D. Salinger: The Mirror of Crisis." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student



J. D. Salinger: Rare Quixotic Gesture
"J. D. Salinger: Rare Quixotic Gesture," in his Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel, Princeton
University Press, 1961, pp. 259-89.
[An Egyptian-born American critic, Hassan has written and edited numerous literary studies, including Radical Innocence:
The Contemporary American Novel, from which the following commentary is excerpted. In a generally appreciative overview
of Salinger's writings, Hassan discusses his characters' "rare quixotic gestures" and identifies them as central to the
meaning of Salinger's fiction. Salinger's inclusion in Hassan's study is considered to have been significant in gaining
Salinger credence among critics.]
The dramatic conflict which so many of Salinger's stories present obviously does not lend itself to sociological
classification. It is more loving and particular, and it partakes of situations that have been traditionally available to
literature. The conflict, however, suggests a certain polarity between what might be called, with all due exaggeration, the
Assertive Vulgarian and the Responsive Outsider. Both types recur with sufficient frequency to warrant the distinction,
and their interplay defines much that is most central to Salinger's fiction. The Vulgarian, who carries the burden of
squalor, stands for all that is crude, venal, self-absorbed, and sequacious in our culture. He has no access to knowledge
or feeling or beauty, which makes him all the more invulnerable, and his relationship to the world is largely predicated by
Buber's I-It dyad. He or she can be rich or poor: ... Sandra and Mrs. Snell in "Down at the Dinghy," Joanie in "Pretty
Mouth and Green My Eyes," The Matron of Honor in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," Maurice, Stradlater, or
any number of others in The Catcher in the Rye. These, in a sense, are Spiritual Tramps, as Seymour called his wife in "A
Perfect Day for Bananafish," though he might have better said it of her mother. The Outsider, on the other hand, carries
the burden of love. The burden makes of him sometimes a victim, and sometimes a scapegoat saint. His life is like "a
great inverted forest/with all foliage underground." It is a quick, generous, and responsive life, somehow preserved
against hardness and corruption, and always attempting to reach out from its isolation in accordance with Buber's I-
Thou dyad. Often there is something in the situation of the Outsider to isolate him, to set him off, however slightly,
from the rest of mankind. He might be a child or an adolescent, might wear glasses or appear disfigured, might be
Jewish, though seldom is he as crippled or exotic as the characters of Capote and McCullers often are. His ultimate
defense, as Rilke, to whom Salinger refers, put it, is defenselessness.... Boo Boo Tannenbaum (Glass) and her son,
Lionel, Seymour and other members of the Glass family, Holden and Phoebe, in the previous stories, are examples of
that type.
The response of these outsiders and victims to the dull or angry world about them is not simply one of withdrawal: it
often takes the form of a strange, quixotic gesture. The gesture, one feels sure, is the bright metaphor of Salinger's
sensibility, the center from which meaning drives, and ultimately the reach of his commitment to past innocence and
current guilt. It is a gesture at once of pure expression and of expectation, of protest and prayer, of aesthetic form and
spiritual contentas Blackmur would say, it is behavior that sings. There is often something prodigal and spontaneous
about it, something humorous or whimsical, something that disrupts our habits of gray acquiescence and revives our
faith in the willingness of the human spirit. But above all, it gives of itself as only a religious gesture can. In another age,
Cervantes endowed Don Quixote with the capacity to perform it, and so did Twain and Fitzgerald endow their best
creations. For the gesture, after all, has an unmistakably American flourish. The quest of American adolescents, as we
saw, has always been for an idea of truth. It is this very idea of truth that the quixotic gesture is constantly seeking to
embody. The embodiment is style in action: the twist and tang, the stammering and improvisations, the glint and humor
of Salinger's language. Hence the examples of ... the man about to commit suicide who makes up a story about
bananafish for a little girl, the lover who calls the sprained ankle of his sweetheart Uncle Wiggily, the young man who
insists on giving half a chicken sandwich to a stranger, the college girl who trains herself to pray incessantly and does so
in the toilet of a restaurant, and the bridegroom who is too happy to appear at his wedding. Out of context these may
well sound trite or crazy; in their proper place they are nodes of dramatic significance.
But gesture is language too. The quixotic gesture, the central dramatic metaphor, to which Salinger has committed
himself defines the limits of his language and the forms his fiction takes. When the gesture aspires to pure religious
expressionthis is one polelanguage reaches into silence. To a writer of fiction, this is a holy dead end, much as the


experiments of Mallarme, say, impose a profanethat is, aestheticlimit on the language of poetry. (One of "The Four
Statements" of Zen, we recall, is: "No dependence upon words and letters.") When, on the other hand, the gesture
reveals its purely satiric contentthis is the other polelanguage begins to lapse into sentimentality. This is the most
persistent charge leveled against Salinger. Salinger's "sentimentality," however, is not obedient to the New Yorker doctrine
of sardonic tenderness, which is really a way of grudging life emotions that the writer feigns to indulge. But if
sentimentality means a response more generous than the situation seems objectively to warrant, then Salinger may
choose to plead guilty. And he would be right to do so, for the spiritual facts of our situation invite us to reconceive our
notions of dramatic objectivity, and the right kind of emotional excess, nowadays, can be as effective as the sharpest
irony.
Between the poles of silence and sentiment, language reels and totters. Salinger's cumbersome experiments with
character, tense, and point of view in his most recent stories betray his efforts to discover a language which can reconcile
the worldless impulse of love to the discursive irony of squalor. In the past, while the quixotic gesture could still convey
the force of his vision, reconciliation took the shape of the short story, that genre so richly exploited by the single lyric
impulse seeking embodiment in dramatic form. But the quixotic motif seems no longer commensurate with the complex
spiritual states by which Salinger has lately been possessed. Language must be refracted into its componentsspeech,
letters, diaries, etc.and the form of the short story itself must be broken and expanded into something that is neither a
short story proper nor yet a novelette. In this development, the risks Salinger has taken with his art are contained in the
risks he must take with his religious view of things....
The earliest stories of Salinger appeared, for the most part, in magazines to which we refer as slicks, though four of these
were also published in the now defunct Story. The majority of these pieces makes an uneasy lot, and some are downright
embarrassingit is gratifying to find that Salinger has excluded them all from [Nine Stories]....
The second phase of Salinger's career includes at least three stories which are among the very best he has written: "Uncle
Wiggily in Connecticut," "Down at the Dinghy," and "For Esmewith Love and Squalor." This phase also marks the
level of his most sustained achievement. The cellophane transparency and geometric outlines of the earlier pieces give
way to a constant energy of perception and irritation of the moral sense. Here, in a world which has forfeited its access
to the simple truth, we are put on to the primary fact of mendacity. Here, where the sources of love are frozen and
responsiveness can only survive in clownish attire, we are jolted by the Zen epigraph: "We know the sound of two hands
clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?" ...
In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the taste of life's corruption is so strong in the mouth of Seymour Glass, and the
burden of self-alienation, even from his wife, Muriel, is so heavy, that suicide seems to him the only cleansing act
possible. While Muriel is engaged in a drab and vindictive long-distance conversation with her mother, for whom the
mere name of a fashionable analyst is insurance against all the ills and mysteries of the universe, Seymour entertains a
little girl at their hotel beach.... The contrast between the monstrous and psychotic Seymour, as seen by his mother-in-
lawshe is genuinely worried about her daughterin the first half of the story, and Seymour with Sybil at the beach
makes the silent ironic statement of the piece. Yet even Sybil cannot prevent the world, ruthless as it is with the power
of spiritual vulgarity, from collecting its toll. One feels, however, that the story needs the background of the later Glass
family narratives to give Seymour's suicide its full reference.
If Seymour Glass ... concedes the victory to the world much too easily, Walt Glass and Eloise, in "Uncle Wiggily ...," do
not. The plight of Eloise, who survived the tender and imaginative Walt to lead a conventional married life in
Connecticut, is clear. The hysteria of Eloise focuses on her lonely and sensitive daughter, Ramona, who could be the
illegitimate child of Walt, and is certainly the living reminder of the vision Eloise has compromised and the innocence
she has lost. Again the contrasts between the embittered and knowing Eloise and her inane visitor, Mary Jane, between
Walt, the dead lover, and Lou, the oafish husband, serve to heighten the inability of the self to reveal itself to another.
All that is left to Eloise by way of recognition is the spontaneous and quixotic gesture of kissing the glasses of Ramona,
whom she has bullied into conformity and disillusionment. In another story, "The Laughing Man," the end of Innocence
is more obviously compounded with the end to Romance, and the pressure of adult on boyhood disenchantment is
rendered particularly effective by the use of a narrator who, like Lardner's narrators, serves to elicit from the situation
more irony than they intend.... Here the story of the fabulous Laughing Man is itself the quixotic gesture which has the


power to influence the youthful audience of boys, including the narrator of Salinger's story, but is powerless to save
Gedsulski himself.
Wistful as these stories may appear, Salinger's ideas of innocence and romance, of the urgency of truth and readiness of
imagination, take on a broad social meaning. The stories present in poignant, ironic, and roundabout ways the radical
absence of communion; they define the scope of our guilt. (It is this helpless sense of shame that pieces like "Just Before
the War with the Eskimos" and "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" dramatize so fastidiously.)
The easy efficient gestures of social amentities, which usually conceal an abyss of human failure, are not even present in
"Down at the Dinghy." Quite simply, the story is that of sensitive, four-year-old Lionel Tannenbaum who hears the
housemaid, Sandra, denounce his father as a "big sloppy kike." Lionel does not fully understand the opprobrium of the
term, but the tones and inflections of hate are unmistakable. He runs away to hide his shame and fear in a dinghy, from
which his wise mother, nee Boo Boo Glass, attempts to rescue him back to a troubled world:
"Well, that isn't too terrible," Boo Boo said, holding him between the two vises of her arms and legs. "That isn't the worst
that could happen." She gently bit the rim of the boy's ear. "Do you know what a kike is, baby?"
Lionel was either unwilling or unable to speak up at once. At any rate, he waited till the hiccupping aftermath of his tears
had subsided a little. Then his answer was delivered, muffled but intelligible, into the warmth of Boo Boo's neck. "It's
one of those things that go up in the air, " he said. "With string you hold."
The ignorance of Lionel is as consonant with the immediate requirements of the story as it is with Salinger's larger
intentions. Here as elsewhere, what Salinger has undertaken to discover is that old, ironic discrepancy between illusion
and reality. But in an age of mass reactions and semantic instability, the distance between illusion and reality must
increase to the extent that the opportunities of self-deception are multiplied. In these circumstances, the child becomes
both the dramatic analogue and corrective to our modes of awareness, both the victim and savior of our squalor. His
lack of experience is at once parallel and antithetical to our blind immersion in experience and his natural sagacity is the
corrective to our practiced insensibility. It is much as if Salinger meant innocence to be, in our particular situation, the
redemption of our ignorance. And it is perhaps only by the grace of something like the tender playfulness which Boo
Boo exhibits toward her outraged son that we can recapture the sense of reality, beyond ignorance, beyond innocence.
We concede this ungrudgingly, and in conceding still ask: is this all that so gifted an author can do with the deep-down
complexity of a Jew's fate in our culture?
The mode of irony, shield of Perseus against the Medusa face of our time, qualifies the elegiac motive of Salinger's
stories. But even irony must exhaust its resources, and a time must come for love to show its face in the noonday light.
To the unabashed lyricism of "For Esmewith Love and Squalor," one can only respond joyously. The story is a
modern epithalamium, written on the occasion of Esme's wedding. The narrator, who carries his autobiographical
burden sprightly and high, recollects the time he was a sergeant stationed with the invasion forces in England. On a rainy
afternoon he wanders into a church, and is struck by the angelic voice of Esme, a girl singing in a choir. Later he meets
her, escorted by a governess and a younger brother, in a tearoom. She rescues him from boredom and loneliness by her
wonderful gifts of pertness and sensibilityprecocity, which is the concession adults make to the understanding of
children, is not the point of the story. The young ladyfor she has a titlepromises to write him, and in return asks
him to write for her a story of squalor. Sometime afterward, we see him at the front, in the third person, suffering from
an acute case of battle fatigue. The intolerable Clay, an eternal vulgarian, is his only companion. Squalor, real and
tangible like the dust of death, has settled all about himuntil he finds a battered package from Esme, in which she has
quixotically enclosed her dead father's watch. The narrator can finally fall asleep, for he knows that hell, which
Dostoyevsky defined as the suffering of being unable to love, has been kept in abeyance for another day. The inscription
a German Nazi woman had scrawled on Goebbels' Die Zeit ohne Beispiel, "Dear God, life is hell," is superseded by the
statement of Father Zossima which the narrator appends to it. The horrendous social fact of our century and the
outstanding spiritual motive of the agegenocide and loveare united in the history of a single American soldier, Staff
Sergeant X. Thus the style of personal encounter in the first half of the story redeems the waste and anonymity of the
second half. Thus may love overreach squalor as only love can, and the sound of two hands clapping may be heard the
world around....


The view that Salinger's most recent work predicts something of a new trend is vaguely supported by the troubled,
spiritualistic bent which the latest six narratives share. The content of these stories invites some comparison with the
ideals of Mahayana Buddhism and primitive Christianity, and also invites the condemnation of those who feel that
"mysticism" is out of place in literature. The trend, nevertheless, is a natural outcome of Salinger's earlier interests. For it
is not difficult to imagine how protestant disaffiliation may lead to holy unattachment, and how mysticism may appear,
beyond childhood or adolescence, the last resort of innocence. If love is to survive in a world where personal
communication has signally failed, then it can at least survive in universal compassion: love betrayed into dumbness may
still speak in silence....
Two of the cardinal assumptions in Salinger's work find expression in the Buddhist ideas of tanha, or blind self-
demandingness, and of moksha, a state of liberation achieved by the kind of impersonal compassion which "The Parable
of the Mustard Seed" exemplifies. In Mahayana Buddhism particularly, a religion of the Middle Way which avoids the
excesses of worldliness and asceticism, the characters of Salinger seem to find a gentle and practical ideal against which
their actions may be gauged. The ideal is matter-of-fact rather than mystical, and its emphasis in the Zen Buddhist
variant, to which Salinger refers most directly, is on effortless and continuous love, on the superrational insights of the
Koan exercises, on the poetic concreteness of Haiku, on the virtues of silence, and on the unmediated vision of nature.
For Zen is essentially a condition of being in which, without losing our identity, we are at one with the universe, and it
requires, as does Haiku poetry, a certain harmony between our imaginative and spiritual responsiveness to all things. It
becomes evident that these qualities of Zen define some of the interests which Salinger has constantly kept at heart, and
that Zen itself, in Salinger's work, makes up to an odd way of criticizing contemporary failures....
Art, unfortunately, sometimes falls short of the best spiritual intentions. This is evident in the two narratives which usher
Salinger's "religious phase" in "Teddy," the story of the strange boy who believes in Vedantic incarnation and
detachment, and who vaguely foresees death, is much less satisfactory because it draws on notions that are alien to the
West than because it fails to relate, within the dramatic structure of its narrative, the egoism of Teddy's parents and the
ambiguous malice of his sister to the peculiar source of his own repose. There is also in "Teddy," and much more in "De
Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," an uneasy juxtaposition of aesthetic and spiritual motives which are sometimes blurred
and sometimes too simply resolved. In the latter story, the central character recollects, in manhood, the guiding
revelation of his adolescence. On the surface, the revelation takes a quasi-mystical form. De Daumier-Smith discovers
that art is less important than the sacramental view of life, which can itself transform, better than the creative
imagination, the objects of ugliness and miserythe enameled urinals and bedpans of an orthopedic appliance shop
into "a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed enamel flowers." But as Gwynn and Blotner have argued in their
pamphlet on Salinger, a sexual element enters into the storywitness the imageryand brings to a religious situation
the Oedipal complications of a young art instructor in love with a nun whose drawingsand only the drawingshe has
seen. The piece serves to remind us that the power of sexuality is never directly acknowledged in Salinger's work, and
that love, when it is not refined into a transcendent or artistic ideal, centers on relations from which sex is notably
absent: the love of a woman for a dead sweetheart or a boy for his little sister, or the Glasses for one another....
"It is the duty of the man of letters to supervise the culture of language, to which the rest of culture is subordinate,"
Allen Tate has said, "and to warn us when our language is ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The end of social
man is communion in time through love, which is beyond time." The style J. D. Salinger has created shows clearly what
human ends may be considered proper, and it carries its own warnings about the ways language may come to fail man.
Beneath the tingling surface, the constant play of humor and perception, the ebullience of emotions, which are all part of
Salinger's generosity, there always lurks the sad reality of human failure; and it is much as if the responsiveness, both
spiritual and imaginative, of Salinger's language is constantly trying not only to reveal but also to expiate the burden of
these failures.
Thus whimsey and humor, when they are not simply forms of facetiousness, prove themselves to be quixotic modes of
communion or understanding. Vincent Caulfield, for instance, hits it off immediately with little Mattie Gladwaller [in an
early story] when he says to her: "If A has three apples, and B leaves at three o'clock, how long will it take C to row five
thousand miles upstream, bounded on the north by Chile?" Seymour's funny comments on bananafish or Walt's quip
about Uncle Wiggilythis is a standard Glass techniqueare likewise little testaments of love. There are times,
however, when Salinger's wit, itself a form of satiric awareness, seems more biting and hyperbolicFranny describes a
Bennington-Sarah Lawrence type of girl by saying that she "looked like she'd spent the whole train ride in the john,


sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard under her dress." The source of humor can also be
found in the intimate and disconcerting gesture which reveals actor to witness, and witness to reader, in a peculiar
light... Spencer picks his nose, making out "like he was only pinching it," while doling out advice to Holden Caulfield.
But of the different kinds of humor Salinger uses, humor of contrast and situation, of action and characterization, of
sudden perception and verbal formulationSalinger seems to be fond of strung expressions like "the God-and-Walter
Winchell section of the Stork Club"of all these it may be said that their ultimate function is to sharpen our sense of
the radical discrepancy between what is and what ought to be.
The discrepancy is apparent in the verbal nature of his style which itself attempts to convey the difficulty of
communication between human beings. Adolescents as well as adults are constantly groping for the life-giving Word.
Their recourse to such expressions as "Oh, I don't know," and "You know what I mean," to oaths and obscenities, to
trailing, fragmentary speeches and fierce emphases on neutral syllables, to solecisms, repetitions, cliches, and asides,
betrays both the urgency of their need and the compulsion to save their utterances from the fate of mere ejaculation.
Even the structure of Salinger's storiesthe obsessive use of first person narration or intimate dialogue, of epistolary
and diary techniques, of the confessional toneeven the structure calls our attention to the tight, lucent caul from which
the captive self seldom escapes. It is not accidental that the recording consciousness of the later stories, Buddy Glass,
describes himself as "the odd man out," or that so many crucial experiences seem to take place within the tiled sanctum
of the Glass bathrooms. The rambling, ranting, devotional forms of these narratives equally deny the classic precepts of
the short story and the well-made novelette. As Buddy puts it, the short story form eats up fat little undetached writers
like him whole. This is quite in keeping with Salinger's purpose, which is to discover the form of confession and
communion, the way the self can be made available to another, the point at which the irrelevant fact and transcendental
idea silently meet. The purpose is not easy to achieve. Two warring impulses of the soul distend the shape of Salinger's
most recent fiction: one cries in outrage at a world dominated by sham and spiritual vulgarity, the other knows, as
Seymour did, that Christ ordered us to call no man a Fool. Revulsion and holiness make up the rack on which Salinger's
art still twitches.
In retrospect, the artistic identity of Salinger, which also may be called his limitation, appears clear enough. Despite his
striking gifts for dialogueSalinger had once expressed the hope of becoming a playwrightthe broad sense of
dramatic participation is lacking in his fiction. The lack is not occasioned by the refusal of Salinger's characters to engage
reality; rather is it occasioned by their insistence to engage no more of reality than they can ultimately criticize. Their
access to social facts remains limited. And their very identity, their recurrent types and their intransigence toward
experience, often admits to their visionand to ours, since no other vision qualifies theirssuch extremes of
corruption and innocence as make the complex entanglements of life beyond their reach. Then, too, the cult they make
of vulnerability, of amateurism in life, which is the very opposite of Hemingway's cult of professionalism, diffuses the
pressure of Salinger's insight onto a rather thin surface. The quixotic gestureSeymour searching for God by poking his
finger into ashtraysis made to carry a heavier burden of meaning than it can sustain. Love averts itself easily in
whimsey or laughter. The highest candor requires us to praise things by adjectives no more complex than the word
"nice."
But from the early search for innocence to the later testament of love, from the slick adequacy of his earlier style to the
tense lyrical form of his later, if not latest, stories, Salinger has kept faith with the redeeming powers of outrage and
compassion. His faith in these has not always allowed him to reconcile their shifting focus or to create the forms of
dramatic permanence. When reconciliation is granted, when the rare, quixotic gesture, striking through, becomes the
form of fiction, incarnate and ineluctable, we see Salinger at last for what he is: an American poet, his thin and intelligent
face all but lost among the countless faces of the modern city, his vision, forever lonely and responsive, troubled by the
dream of innocence and riddled by the presence both of love and of squalor. What saves Salinger's vision from
sentimentality is the knowledge that no man can give an object more tenderness than God accords to it. His heroes,
children, adolescents, or adult victims to the affluence of their own spirit, play upon our nostalgia for a mythic American
past. They also manage to raise nostalgia to the condition of hope....


Source Citation:
Hassan, Ihab. "J. D. Salinger: Rare Quixotic Gesture." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student


J. D. Salinger
"J. D. Salinger," in Reference Guide to American Literature, edited by Jim Kamp, St. James Press, 1994, pp. 749-50.
[In the following essay, French remarks on Salinger's major works.]
Of his writings, J.D. Salinger has so far wished to preserve only a novel and thirteen short stories, all published between
1948 and 1959, mostly in the New Yorker. Despite this limited body of work, Salinger was, at least between 1951 and
1963, the most popular American fiction writer among serious young persons and many alienated adults because of the
way in which he served as a spokesman for the feelings of his generation. Thus his work is of unique interest as evidence
of the sensibility of those times.
Salinger had taken a short-story writing course under Whit Burnett, the influential editor of Story, which gave many
important American fiction writers their start. Salinger's first published work, "The Young Folks," appeared there in
1940. Like much of his later work, this slight piece contrasted the behavior of, on one hand, shy, sensitive and, on the
other, tough, flippant, unfeeling young upper-middle-class urbanites. During the 1940's, Salinger published (in Story and
most of the popular slick magazines like Collier's) another nineteen stories that he has not allowed to be collected. Some
of these, like "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," are of interest for introducing a character named Holden Caulfield,
who resembles the later protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, but who dies during World War II. Most are very short,
heavily ironic tales about troubled young people defeated by what Holden Caulfield would call "the phony world." The
only one of great interest in the light of Salinger's later achievement is the longest, "The Inverted Forest," a cryptic tale
about an artist's relationship to society. The lines quoted from the poetry of the central figure, Raymond Ford"Not
wasteland, but a great inverted forest / with all the foliage underground"suggest that all beauties are internal, so that
the artist is exempt from external responsibilities.
The question of the sensitive individual's responsibility to the world remains the focal question in all of Salinger's best
known fiction. The Catcher in the Rye is the comically grotesque account of Holden-Caulfield's two-and-a-half-day odyssey
through the wasteland of New York City at Christmas time after he decides to quit his fashionable prep school. Holden
dreams of escaping the city and going out West where he can build "a little cabin somewhere... and live there for the rest
of my life ... near the woods, but not right in them" (a description that foreshadows almost exactly the New England
retreat where Salinger himself has lived for the past thirty years). In the speech that gives the novel its title, Holden tells
his little sister Phoebe that the one thing he would like to do is stand guard over "all these little kids playing some game
in this big field of rye and all" and "catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff." But Holden learns, when he sees
obscenities scratched on the walls of Phoebe's elementary school, that "You can't ever find a place that's nice and
peaceful, because there isn't any." And watching Phoebe ride the Central Park carousel, he realizes, "The thing with kids
is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything." Wiser but sadder, he decides
that he must return home rather than take the responsibility for leading Phoebe astray.
Although Salinger is most often identified as the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, who finally
compromises with his social responsibilities, is not the typical hero in Salinger's work. The stories that the author has
chosen to preserve begin and end with accounts of the suicide of Seymour Glass, oldest son and spiritual guide to his six
siblings of a New York Irish-Jewish theatrical family. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the first story in the collection
Nine Stories, the reader learns only the circumstances of Seymour's suicide in a Miami Beach hotel. In "Seymour: An
Introduction," his brother and interpreter Buddy offers at last the explanation for the event: "The true artist-seer ... is
mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."
The eleven stories published between these two carry the reader from the account of the suicide to the illumination of its
significance, and reflect along the way Salinger's increasing absorption in oriental philosophies, especially Zen Buddhism.
Four stories in Nine Stories"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," "The Laughing Man," "Just Before the War with the
Eskimos," and "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes"offer, like The Catcher in the Rye, depressing pictures of people
trapped in the "phony" world but dreaming of a "nice" world. In four of the later stories, however, Salinger suggests that
the grim situation might be ameliorated"Down at the Dinghy" portrays Seymour's sister reconciling her small son to a


threatening world; "For EsmeWith Love and Squalor" is a triumphant epithalamion for a young girl who has done
meaningful good in a warring world; "DeDaumier-Smith's Blue Period" is an amazingly successful description of a
mystical experience that leads a young man to forsake aggressive ambitions; and the famous concluding story, "Teddy,"
presents a boy who has truly absorbed the Buddhist concept of the illusoriness of material life and is prepared to move
serenely beyond it.
In the longer "Glass Sage" stories, Salinger focuses on Seymour's siblings and presents, in "Franny," the story of the
youngest child's breakdown when confronted with the "ego" of the squalid world of college and theater. In "Zooey," her
brother literally talks her out of her breakdown by assuming the voice of the departed Seymour, and counseling, "An
artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's." "Raise High the
Roof Beam, Carpenters" prefaces "Seymour: An Introduction" with Buddy's fond recollection of Seymour's violent
responses to beauty and his supreme affront to the rituals of his urban caste when he persuades his intended to run off
with him on their wedding day instead of submitting to a fancy ceremony.
Since these stories were collected in 1963, Salinger has published only "Hapworth 16, 1924," a labored account of seven-
year-old Seymour's sexual and intellectual proclivities as revealed by a letter home from summer camp. In the one
interview he has granted in recent yearsto object to an unauthorized edition of his uncollected storiesSalinger
protested that he is still writing constantly, but he denounced publication as "a terrible invasion" of his privacy.
Source Citation:
French, Warren. "J. D. Salinger." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold.


Student Notes: Once Upon a Time



Gordimers Once Upon a Time

"Gordimer's 'Once Upon a Time'" in Explicator, Vol. 56, No. 3, Summer, 1998, pp. 213-15. Contemporary Literary
Criticism, volume(s) 70:178; 161:351, 371 Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 17:177, 183, 185, 187, 190-91; 80:18, 27-30,
34
[South African woman author Nadine Gordimer had long been critical of her country in covert fashion throughout a
writing career spanning almost 50 years. While her criticism was previously incorporated into the multifaceted, frequently
lyrical, and always essentially realistic depictions of her native land, its life, and people, Gordimer's criticism gradually
became more overt as she became more publicly committed to the struggle against apartheid in the 1980s. This new
stage in Gordimer's development can be seen even in the short story "Once Upon a Time."]
Although she feels a "realistic optimism" (qtd. in Lazar 163) about her country now, throughout her nearly half-century-
long writing career, Nadine Gordimer has been one of South Africa's main critics; thus her difficulties with
governmental censorship. Her criticism, however, was usually indirect, woven into the multifaceted, often lyrical
portraits of her native land, its life and people. But as she became more publicly committed to the struggle against
apartheid in the 1980s, her criticism turned more overt, and, interestingly, her literary approach, always essentially
realistic, became more experimental.(1) Even a small work, such as her 1989 short story "Once Upon a Time," well
illustrates this new stage in Gordimer's development.
In this brief, two-part story, the meaning is conveyed most clearly in the second and longer part, in which Gordimer
narrates in a detached, ironic manner the story of an unnamed, rather well-to-do white middle-class couple, their small
son, dog, and a cat, all living "happily ever after" in an affluent suburb. But as the couple hear more and more of riots by
people of another race outside the city, and occasional stabbings and robberies within it and the suburb, and as they see
increasing numbers of the unemployed at their doorstep (although the situation is generalized, Gordimer's native
Johannesburg and Soweto inevitably come to mind), they grow increasingly fearful. Their security walls, on which they
post "YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED" (26), grow higher and stronger. Finally, they build the ultimate protective fence
of horrific, razor-sharp, jagged blades, "dragon's teeth," within which they live "securely," in concentration camp style -
until the fence grotesquely mangles not an intruder but their own small son.
The meaning of this parable or small allegory is unmistakable. In it Gordimer warns her racist society of its inequity,
isolation, and impending self-destruction. The power of the story is enhanced through the postmodernist incongruity
between the simple, once-upon-a-time, fairy tale approach and style, and the expectations that they raise, and the
sardonic development and shocking ending of the story. The meaning is further enhanced by its dramatization through
three generations - the mother-in-law, throughout called "the wise old witch," the couple, and the child. It is the "old
witch" who encourages in the couple their distrust of each other, their fear, and the desire for "security." She is the one
who pays for the bricks to make their initial fence higher (as a Christmas present!). Clearly she represents the older
generation that instituted apartheid and all the evils that it spawned. Ironically, this grandmother is also the one who
gives the little boy a book of fairy tales for Christmas, one of which he is enacting when he is killed. The white society
may see its elders as "wise," but the system they have constructed and its principles are poisonous and dangerous, a
lethal delusion.
In contrast to the second part, the first, and much shorter, part of the story seems initially no more than a personal
account of how the main story has come about. The narrator/author tells us in her own voice that one night she woke in
fear when she thought she heard an intruder, only to realize that she had been awakened by some creaking in the house.
When she still cannot return to sleep, she tells herself "a bedtime story" (25) of the family in the suburbs. This part, then,
clarifies for us the narrator's connection to the society. She also feels vulnerable and is subject to fear of violence - "my
windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass" (24) - an inevitable byproduct of an unjust society. But she
does not isolate herself: "I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow . . ." (23). She also does not delude herself, as
the others do. At the beginning, she tells us in the present tense that she has been asked, then expected, nearly ordered,
to write a story for children, which she refuses to do. As she does compose her "bedtime story," it is clearly and
mercilessly one for adults instead. No matter what her personal fears, she is a truth seer and truth teller.


In the first part also, the account of why she woke suddenly yields further meaning.
[T]he creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on
undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have
hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts
slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a
structure around me. (85-86)
The plunder of the country's resources has also played a part in undermining and destabilizing the lives of its inhabitants.
The symbolic picture also relates directly to Gordimer and the 1980s when, she states, she and others sensed a new
"climate" permeating the country, "the feeling that apartheid wasn't made of granite, that it was crumbling, that there
was some kind of attrition from within" (qtd. in Lazar 151). Foreshadowing and retrospect coincide. Thus the first part
of the story complicates the second, enriching and deepening the whole.
- VERA P. FROELICH and JENNIFER HALLE, Bryant College
NOTE
1. Gordimer stated recently that especially her participation for the defense in the infamous Delmas Treason Trials of
1986-89, in which 22 United Democratic Front members were charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government,
and the public proclamations she made there in favor of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress,
constituted a "watershed in [her] political development" (qtd. in Lazar 153-54).
WORKS CITED
Gordimer, Nadine. "Once Upon a Time." Jump. New York: Farrar, 1991.21-30.
Lazar, Karen. "A Feeling of Realistic Optimism." An interview with Nadine Gordimer. Salmagundi 113 (winter 1997):
149-65.

Source Citation:
Froelich, Vera P, and Jennifer Halle. "Gordimers Once Upon a Time." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale,
2003. Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007


Student Notes: Eveline



James Joyce

[In the following essay, Benstock presents an overview of Joyce's life and career.]
Few writers have as secure a claim to be the major figure of the modernist period in literary history as James Joyce, a
position that he prepared himself for with diligence and commitment. During his student days at University College in
Dublin he prophetically envisioned his role as the major writer of his age, although he remained for a time undecided as
to the form that his writing would take. Even before his twentieth birthday Joyce wrote and arranged to have published
(with an essay by his friend F. J. C. Skeffington) an essay titled "The Day of the Rabblement" (1901), which concluded
with a prophecy: "Elsewhere there are men who are worthy to carry on the tradition of the old master who is dying in
Christiana. He has already found his successor in the writer of Michael Kramer, and a third minister will not be wanting
when his hour comes. Even now that hour may be standing by the door." In placing himself immodestly in the
succession of Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann, the young Joyce still visualized himself as a potential playwright
(and may well have dedicated an early play to his own soulno published work of his was ever dedicated to anyone),
but of the three plays he presumably wrote, he allowed only the later Exiles (1918) to survive. During his youth he also
persisted in composing lyric poetrythe basic literary medium of the age he lived inand continued to write poems
even after he settled into a career as a novelist. In Ulysses (1922) the boastful young poet Stephen Dedalus is deflated by
his companion Lynch, who asserts, "those leaves ... will adorn you more fitly when something more, and greatly more,
than a capful of light odes can call your genius father." To make good on the claim (also attributed to Stephen in Ulysses)
that he "is going to write something in ten years," Joyce turned to prose narrative, first in a series of short stories and a
quasi-autobiographical novel. The publication of Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
brought him to the attention of the literati, while the 1922 publication of Ulysses brought him to the attention of the
world.
The year of Joyce's birth, 1882, was also the year in which several other contributors to modernism were born (Virginia
Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Igor Stravinsky, Georges Braque, Mina Loy, and futurist Umberto Boccioni), but the world
into which he was born was light years away from the intimations of international modernism. Dublin was then still the
second city of the British Empire, and the coincidental birth in 1882 of Eamon de Valera, who would eventually rule
over an independent Ireland, is far more germane to the provincial Irish environment in which Joyce was reared. His
family was Roman Catholic and his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, had property in his native city of Cork; but the family
fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse during Joyce's childhood. John Joyce had allied himself politically with Charles
Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary party that sought home rule for Ireland, and the divorce scandal in
1881 that destroyed Parnell's career also cost Joyce's father his patronage job. The economic decline of the bourgeois
Joyces is caustically traced in Stephen Dedalus's description in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of his father as a
"medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a
drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at
present a praiser of his own past." Mary Jane Murray, Joyce's mother, was a devout Catholic who had hoped for a
clerical vocation for her oldest son, and her death when James Joyce was only twenty-one signaled the end of the
disrupted and impoverished family, which included at least ten children who had survived infancy. In various ways Joyce
wove the details of his own life into each of his novels, using these autobiographical materials as an imaginative fabric
that he frequently rewove.
The intellectual climate during Joyce's youth also figures prominently in his works, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man and Ulysses, as he views the flourishing Irish literary revival from the sidelines with a mixture of anxiety and
indifference. Both the strong nationalism, with its accentuation on the revived Gaelic language, and the accompanying
mysticism were unacceptable to the young Joyce, and he was determined to establish himself in the European
mainstream, referring contemptuously to Ireland as a "backwater," and "an afterthought of Europe." The emphasis on
Ibsen and Hauptmann in the modern literary world paralleled his interest in the medieval Catholicism of Dante, as he
sought an intellectual and spiritual heritage for his artistic commitment, a commitment that distanced him from William
Butler Yeats and AE (George Russell) and the Celtic Twilight movement that he would later characterize in Finnegans
Wake as the "cultic twalette." He was also sensitive to the major achievement of the English literary tradition which
spanned the eight centuries in which Ireland was under English rule, and the accomplishment of a William Shakespeare


within that tradition. Whereas his friends in Gaelic League classes were attempting to return to the moribund Irish
language, Joyce accepted with misgivings the necessity of writing in the tongue of the conquerors in order to broaden his
intellectual perspectives, and, like his Stephen figure, he relied on "the only arms I allow myself to usesilence, exile,
and cunning." His estrangement from Ireland became as necessary to him as detachment from family, friends, and
religion; once he had finished his university education in 1902 (he had studied Romance languages), he made his way to
the European continent. Tentative self-exile as a medical student in Paris actually found him at the Bibliotheque
Nationale reading Ben Jonson, an influence on the delicate lyrics that he later published as Chamber Music (1907), but his
mother's serious illness brought him back to Dublin for more than a year. When he left in October 1904 to become a
teacher of English at a Berlitz school in Pola, 70 miles south of Trieste, Joyce took with him a young woman, Nora
Barnacle, who would remain his wife for the rest of his life on the Continent, although he refused to honor the
sacrament of marriage and remained outside the Church as well. (They legalized their marriage in a civil ceremony on 4
July 1931.)
The history of Joyce's lifelong exile on the Continent is also the history of his artistic development and of his literary
publications. He brought with him to Trieste, where he settled with Nora after a short period of teaching in Pola, the
poems that would appear as Chamber Music in 1907, the stories that he began publishing in the Irish Homestead in 1904,
and the completed chapters of a quasi-autobiographical novel he called Stephen Hero (posthumously published in 1944).
The birth of a son, Giorgio (in 1905), and a daughter, Lucia (in 1907), extended the immediate family, but Joyce also
managed to lure a brother, Stanislaus, and a sister, Eva, from DublinStanislaus Joyce was his closest sibling and would
prove to be his severest critic. By 1906 the short stories had been tentatively shaped into a volume titled Dubliners, and
years of publication delays and cancellations resulted in anger and bitterness, so that his last visit to his native city in
1912 resulted in his determination never to return to Ireland. By 1907 he had scrapped some thousand pages of Stephen
Hero and reconstituted the scheme into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which also ran into difficultieshis own
delay in completing the book. Nonetheless, the Trieste years (which ended with the advent of World War I) determined
Joyce's views of his own literary talents as a writer of prose fiction.
In 1915 the Joyces were granted permission to leave for neutral Zurich, Joyce, having completed A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man and begun Ulysses, taking time away from fiction writing long enough to write Exiles. Most of Ulysses was
written during the war years in Zurich, but the composition of that work is actually a tale of three cities: in 1920, after a
short attempt to reestablish himself in Trieste, Joyce heeded the call of Ezra Pound to come to live in Paris, where
Ulysses was published in book form in 1922. The Paris years lasted until the outbreak of World War II, during which
fame as well as notoriety, and even financial largesse, were component factors in Joyce's life. He worked on Finnegans
Wake (segments of which were published under the tentative title of Work in Progress in small limited editions and in little
magazines such as transition and by esoteric presses between 1928 and 1937) and lived the life of a fairly affluent
bourgeois. A long series of eye operations and Lucia Joyce's progressive development of mental illness, which Joyce
insisted on hiding from himself, plagued these years of success. No sooner was Finnegans Wake published in 1939 than
the war broke out, and the Joyces were once again on the road to exile. A stay in the south of France eventually led to
their being admitted into Switzerland again, once Lucia was hospitalized and the rumor that Joyce was a Jew was
scotched. Three weeks after arriving in Zurich, James Joyce died on the operating table of peritonitis.
Joyce's reputation as a fiction writer rests on his three completed novels, although his innovative techniques in narrative
prose allow his short-story collection Dubliners (1914) to be included into the novelistic scheme he created. Originally
slight vignettes that earned him a few pounds, these stories were eventually fashioned into a coherent unity, a highly
structured text in which each component element is balanced in support of the whole. By 1905 Joyce had decided on a
format composed of twelve storiesthree on childhood, three on young adults, three on mature adults, and three final,
longer stories of public life. The publication delays that caused increasing frustrations for Joyce also allowed him to
elaborate on the pattern, so that the two inner groups were expanded to four each, and "The Dead" was added as a
cumulative coda story, a novella that was much longer than even the longest story of public life. That in 1906 Joyce
toyed with the idea of adding another piece, a story to be titled "Ulysses," indicates the degree to which the larger
narrative format began dominating his thinking. The collection of fifteen stories was finally published in 1914, and the
idea for Ulysses took shape as a long novel instead.
The basic unit of Joyce's early prose work was what he called an "epiphany," a minute anecdote or observation, an
overheard conversation, or a recorded dream sequence. Each first existed as a separate entity, but they were soon


worked into the Stephen Hero manuscript. A definition of that minimal art form appears in the extant text of this early
novel: "By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a
memorable phrase of the mind itself.... the most delicate and evanescent of moments." Even as late a work as Ulysses
contains one of the early epiphanies folded into the elaborate structure, and although epiphanies are not present as
separate and discrete texts, the essence of the concept was retained throughout the novels, so that Finnegans Wake as well
elaborates upon a progression of anecdotes and fables, extensions of the humble epiphany. The first stories that Joyce
wrote for the Irish Homestead were hardly more than extended epiphanies, vignettes that were short, simple,
straightforward, and easily comprehensible, upon which he would later build for the Dubliners collection, which in 1904
Joyce first conceived of as a series of ten pieces that he called "epicleti." As the volume grew in size Joyce announced his
intended style as that of "scrupulous meanness," and although the stories retained their apparent aspect of simplicity,
they were far from random selections of Dublin life, especially since Joyce advertised them to prospective publishers as a
"moral chapter of the history" of Ireland, citing the city of Dublin as the "centre of paralysis."
Joyce's focus in Dubliners is almost exclusively on the middle-class Catholics known to himself and his family. Within the
confines of that major element of the social structure of the city, however, he managed to determine numerous
variations and combinations: among the Dublin Catholic bourgeoisie an occasional former Protestant can be seen
backsliding in "Grace," and an acknowledged Protestant is present at the Christmastime festivities among his Catholic
neighbors in "The Dead." "Grace" even alludes to a Dublin Jew, one of that very small community in the city at that
time, which Joyce would explore further in Ulysses. As for the economic level of these middle-class citizens, Joyce's range
is extensive: shop girl, law-office clerk, bank employee, the scion of a wealthy butcher, and the shiftless son of a police
official, as well as those living on more meager incomes. The occasional workman is glimpsed in "Two Gallants," and
the suggestion of wealth is apparent in "After the Race," but essentially Dubliners presents the common denominations of
the petty bourgeoisie.
The first three stories, "The Sisters," "An Encounter," and "Araby," are not only concerned with childhood but each is
also narrated through the first-person perspective of a young boy, either the same protagonist in the progression of three
stories or a separate protagonist in each. Anonymous, of no specific age, and ostensibly parentless (he lives with an aunt
and uncle in "The Sisters" and "Araby"), he undergoes a series of somewhat traumatic experiences, well within the
framework of ordinary childhood occurrences: the death of a priest who had served as his mentor, a run-in with a
menacing stranger when out on a day's truancy from school, and disappointment during a period of immature love when
he arrives late at a church bazaar, where he had hoped to buy a gift for a girl. In each case the effect on the boy is
measured by his own narrative, the immediacy recorded by the limited perception of an intelligent but nonetheless
inexperienced and susceptible consciousness. As his aunt gossips with the priest's sisters at the side of the coffin, the boy
is expected to register betrayal and bewilderment about the cleric's presumed madness, but the method of narration only
allows for the recording of the actual conversation without any registering of the boy's reactions. When encountering the
pederast the boy attempts several childish ploys for his own protection against something he cannot really comprehend,
but finds himself envious of his companion, a boy he considers his inferior, who nonetheless proves impervious to the
danger. And when, in "Araby," he nurtures his pure and sacred affection for a slightly older girl, envisioning himself as a
chivalric knight carrying his chalice through a corrupt world, the sordidly ordinary bazaar defeats him, and he views
himself as "a creature driven and derided by vanity." His awareness and articulative powers increase as he moves through
these events.
From the fourth story on, the method of narration in Dubliners changes to the impersonal third person as the focus
changes from childhood to the adult world, a loss of the honest immediacy of the immature perceiver and a shift to the
calculated responses of the adult, but fused through an "objective" reproduction of events. "Eveline," "After the Race,"
"Two Gallants," and "The Boarding House," however, deal with the inexperience of what Joyce called adolescence, the
ages of the four protagonists ranging from nineteen to the early thirties. They are each trapped in the paralytic condition
of the lives that they have fashioned around them, despite the numerous differences in their individual situations.
Eveline Hill is already on the eve of her departure from Dublin with a sailor-lover who is presumably taking her to
Argentina, yet her eagerness to leave her tyrannical father and depressing job fails to take account of the strength of her
obligation to her dead mother to care for the young children of the family; and at the gate to the ship Eveline finds
herself physically unable to take the important step to personal freedom. Her impoverished circumstances and her
poverty of spirit contrast sharply with the wealth and elan of Jimmy Doyle, who in "After the Race" is involved in the
exciting world of foreign auto racers, sophisticated drinkers and gamblers, quite unaware how much he is out of his


element until the all-night carousal ends in his having lost a substantial sum of money, probably most of his patrimony.
Few of Joyce's Dubliners begin with so great a financial advantage, and few fall from such exalted financial heights: in
"Two Gallants" Lenehan and Corley are unemployed loungers, although Corley's father is a police inspector, and
Corley's mysterious assignation with a servant girl leaves Lenehan wandering aimlessly and dejectedly through Dublin,
until his friend's return with the profits from his adventure, a halfsovereign stolen by the slavey that will provide the
gallants with drinking money. Their desultory lives are set against the seriousness of Bob Doran, gainfully employed and
residing in a boardinghouse, where he has been seduced by the proprietor's daughter, is facing the distasteful prospect of
marrying her against his will and better judgment, and is terrified lest he lose his job because of scandal.
The mature protagonists of the next quartet of narratives, "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," "Clay," and "A Painful
Case," extend the possibilities potential in the lives of the previous four, but with no further positive development.
Thomas Chandler of "A Little Cloud" is basically the same age as Lenehan and Bob Doran, and apparently as securely
employed as Doran, but he is already married and the father of an infant son. He dreams of being a poet and expanding
his horizon, and on this particular evening he has drinks with an old acquaintance, a raffish journalist now on the
London press. But Chandler's sensibilities are disquieted by Gallaher's coarse bragging, and he retreats home to read
Byron, only to be defeated by his child's wailing and his wife's anger. His counterpart is a clerk named Farrington, a
family man apparently unsuited to his sedentary job, who runs afoul of his employer because of his indolence and
insolence. Pawning his watch for a night's carousal, Farrington is bested at hand wrestling by an English artiste and runs
through his money, failing to get sufficiently drunk. Frustrated and resentful, he takes out his aggression on his son, after
he arrives home to find that the kitchen fire has been allowed to go out. These two married men then are succeeded by
two unmarried protagonists: in "Clay" Maria leaves the laundry where she is employed for a Hallow Eve visit to the
family of Joe Donnelly, for whom she served as a surrogate mother years ago. Her innocence and simpleminded naivete
prevent her from sensing the hollowness and pathos of her empty life, as she is tricked by the neighbor's children into
choosing the symbol of death in a game of divination. Her precarious existence is contrasted with the solid security of
James Duffy in "A Painful Case," a bachelor who has insulated himself from all unpleasant contacts with other people by
living alone and dependent only on his own resources. A casual friendship with a married woman, however, had almost
disturbed that stability, and he had abruptly terminated it before emotional involvement set in. Now he finds in a
newspaper item that she has drunkenly been killed or killed herself, and the horror of her death becomes increasingly
more obvious to himalong with the emptiness of his own life.
The shift to public life in the fuller narratives "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," "A Mother," and "Grace" expands the
focus beyond concentration on a single protagonist, but in actuality a central character persists as dominant in at least
the last two of the triad. More important, "Dubliners" in general prove to be communal protagonists, especially in "Ivy
Day in the Committee Room," where a handful of political canvassers stroll into their headquarters on a cold rainy day,
discussing the politics of the day, as well as of the past when Charles Stewart Parnell was their party leader and
"uncrowned king" of Irelandalthough the eleven years since his death have devastated their loyalties and enthusiasms.
The ghost of Parnell hovers over the committee room, and all of the petty politicos present are viewed in relation to the
dead leader. In "A Mother" music replaces politics as another public concern in Dublin, but disappointing attendance at
a concert series necessitates cutting expenses by the officiating committee, which then attempts to renege on payment to
the accompanist, a young woman whose career is being orchestrated by her mother. The ensuing tensions and flare-up
result in Mrs. Kearney's whisking her daughter Kathleen out of the auditorium in mid-concert, seriously jeopardizing her
musical future in Dublin. The degraded state of Irish politics and the depleted enthusiasm for culture in Dublin are then
reflected in the condition of Irish Catholicism in "Grace," a tale of presumed spiritual redemption. When Tom Kernan, a
backsliding Protestant who has married into the Catholic faith, drunkenly falls in a pub lavatory and bites off a tiny bit of
his tongue, his Good-Samaritan Catholic friends quietly lure him into attending a retreat for worldly businessmen, at
which a Jesuit preacher sets up a double-entry bookkeeping system for virtues and sins. This variant of simony is the
most potent in Dubliners, where the selling of that which is sacred is an important theme, beginning with the desire of the
paralytic Father Flynn in "The Sisters" to school the young boy for the priesthood in which he himself was disappointed.
The boy, fascinated by portentous words, professes an interest in "paralysis," "gnomon," and "simony," words that have
their thematic reverberations throughout the ensuing stories.
The placing of "The Dead" at the end of this progression of balanced stories is somewhat anomalous in that it is a
novella far longer than any of the other tales, and presumably outside the sequence. Joyce confessed, when the
preexisting fourteen stories constituted the complete volume, that he found his stories rather harsh and that they failed


to include the Irish talent for hospitality. "The Dead" is a Christmas story at which family and friends of the two spinster
sisters, Julia and Kate Morkan, gather for music, dancing, feasting, and drinking. The "sudden spiritual manifestation" of
an epiphany may have a literal understructure in "The Dead," since the festive soiree apparently takes place several days
after the new year, probably on the Day of the Epiphany, and the protagonist, the old women's nephew Gabriel Conroy,
is the logical recipient of that manifestation. A teacher and critic of literature, he considers himself intellectually superior
to the other guests, as he prepares his after-dinner speech, and, as the husband of the "country-cute" Gretta, he fancies
himself still an ardent lover after ten years of marriage. The conversation throughout is often about the past and the
dead, of forgotten singers and monks sleeping in their coffins, and toward the end of the evening Gretta nostalgically
succumbs to the singing of a ballad that reminds her of a young boy who many years before had loved her and died. As
the Conroys settle into their hotel room for the night, Gretta confesses to her husband for the first time that Michael
Furey had died "for her," a passion obviously far greater than any the stolidly bourgeois Gabriel has himself ever
acknowledged. Gretta falls asleep while Gabriel broods quietly at the window, watching the snow fall and perhaps aware
of his own limitations, his pomposity, and his comfortable complacency. At his aunts' he had had a slight unpleasantness
with a young woman who was a fervent Irish nationalist and refused an invitation to take his holidays in the West of
Ireland, despite Gretta's yearning to visit her native Galway. Now at the hotel window he muses over the snow falling on
Michael Furey's grave, of the imminent death of his aged aunt, of snow falling on "all the living and the dead."
In the "style of scrupulous meanness" that Joyce adopted for Dubliners connectives, climaxes, and resolutions are often
missing, attesting to the definition of gnomon in Euclidian geometry cited by the boy in "The Sisters": "the remainder of
a parallelogram after the removal of a similar parallelogram containing one of its corners" (the word gnomon coming
from the Greek for an interpreter, the pointer on a sundial). The stories in Joyce's collection are intended to be read by
comprehending the substance from the shadow it casts or intimating the shadow from the substance. In the world of
Joyce's Dubliners important plumcakes get left behind on trams, and corkscrews cannot be located; anticipated bazaars
prove darkened and emptying; dust covers furniture although the room is dusted regularly; poets remain unread by
would-be poets; and legal documents are not copied by clerks commissioned to copy them; political canvassers go
unpaid, although the eventual appearance of a dozen bottles of stout soon makes them forget about the missing
payment; musical accompanists go unpaid, although when half the promised four guineas is finally offered, even that
payment is four shillings short, and the accompanist is removed by her mother with the concert only half over (Mrs.
Kearney has brought her husband to help her negotiate the terms of her daughter's payment, but he proves ineffectual,
almost as if he were not present). At a religious retreat the pews are filled with politicians and pawnbrokers and
moneylenders, and chalices dropped by paralytic priests are reported to be empty. It is a world of absence and loss,
smaller portions and smaller dividends, of interposing shadows and hollow substances, constricted by paralysis, shot
through with simoniac practices, and gutted by gnomonic removals.
Joyce's scrupulously mean style also informed the new version of Stephen Hero when he began A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man in 1907, practicing a style of stringent economy distinctly different from the rambling novel originally begun
before leaving Dublin. Stephen Hero looked inward into a life, charting it meticulously and completely; and the title hero,
Stephen Dedalus, was to be viewed by a literary process that moved from the first-person singular to the third person,
subjective to objective. Joyce had worked simultaneously on the personal narrative of the artist himself and on the book
of the "others," those Dubliners who gravitated in concentric circles around the consciousness of the artist. Dubliners and
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are best read as superimposed upon each other, as facing narratives of the two
facets of the artist's consciousness of self and others. The boy in the opening triad of stories comes close to the Stephen
of the opening chapters of the novel, sensitive and aware, observing without revealing his own thoughts. At the
Christmas dinner that is the centerpiece of the first chapter, Stephen registers the impact of a disruptive political quarrel
that stuns him into silence, much like his counterpart hearing the two sisters gossiping about the dead priest. A
sensitivity to words also characterizes Stephen Dedalus (Joyce for a while had considered demythologizing Daedalus to a
common Daly but settled for dropping the digraphhe saved the Daly name for one of the aliases used by the
Dedaluses in the last chapter when pawning their possessions), as at school he mulls over homonyms, onomatopoeia,
nomenclature, and bilingual differences. The direction of the young Stephen toward the vocation of the literary artist
determines the structure of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The selected portions of Stephen's life, from infancy to
his departure from Ireland after his university education, contribute specifically to portraying the potentiality of the
artist, and all other aspects of personal biography seem to have been stripped away.


Where Stephen Hero had the projected shape and girth of a nineteenth-century novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, with jumps in chronology and tightly constructed vignettes, points toward the modernist narrative of the twentieth.
The extant pages from the earlier version (published after Joyce's death) contain fully developed and elaborated
incidents, some that Joyce later eliminated, some that he retained, others that he merely suggested in the succeeding
novel. The economy Joyce practiced in his revision becomes all the more apparent in contrast to the remnants of Stephen
Hero. As soon as he began the reconstitution of his material, Joyce envisioned a book in five long chapters, the first three
of which he completed between October 1907 and early April 1908. The rhythmic rise and fall within each of the five
parts controls the structuring of A Portrait of the Artist, as Stephen undergoes the traumatic instances of development and
maturation between exploring the infant's world with the awakening of his five senses (the opening paragraphs of the
text) and the suspended conclusion at which he prepares to embark for Paris. Chapter one concludes with schoolboy
Stephen in triumph, lauded by his schoolmates for having bravely defied authority by having sought redress from the
rector for being unfairly punished. Chapter two ends with the adolescent swooning in the arms of a prostitute for the
first time, while chapter three ends with his return to piety, confessing his sins and being absolved. At the end of chapter
four the potential artist undergoes an equally spiritual conversion, having encountered his muse and embraced his
vocation, rejecting the possible vocation in the priesthood, and at the conclusion of chapter five he sets out for his new
career and a new life, announcing, "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
The heightened curve of Stephen's emotions are inevitably countered by the realities of his youthful experiences, and
each new chapter begins in sharp contrast to the exultations with which the previous one has been resolved. At the
beginning of the second chapter Stephen is very much at loose ends: he has been withdrawn from the prestigious Jesuit
boarding school because of the decline of his father's financial condition. As the third chapter opens, the ecstasy of
sexual initiation has become a sordid commonplace, quickly developing into morbid guilt, and, although the spiritual
cleansing evoked the ecstasy of virtue and grace, that new life at the start of the fourth chapter is already jejune,
mechanical, and without spiritual enthusiasm. While the elan of his decision to become an artist is expected to carry
through the entire last chapter, that section nonetheless begins in the most banal manner, as Stephen drags out his
pathetic breakfast, his mother scrubbing his dirty neck, resentful that he chose the university in lieu of the seminary, and
his father gratuitously cursing him. The aftermath of elation is invariably depression, and the triumph with which A
Portrait of the Artist concludes is eventually undercut by the deflated opening of Ulysses.
The central focus of A Portrait of the Artist remains exclusively with Stephen throughout, and a narrative monologue
tracks his perceptions and reactions, although at the early stages of his development those reactions that are traumatic
are suspended, leaving meaningful gaps in the narrative process. An opening series of vignettes establishes the infant's
perceiving his immediate world of parents and then other resident adults; his contained environment and then the road
that runs outside his house; and eventually the child's contacts with neighboring elements, including the little girl who
lives nearby. All five senses are employed in viewing his father's face, hearing his mother sing, differentiating her odor
from that of his father, tasting candy, and experiencing the tactile sensations of wet, warm, cold. An infusion of literature
(children's stories), music (songs), and dance leads to the child's own attempts to imitate and innovate; and when he is
caught at a childish transgression, the voices of authority split between the palliative of apology and the insistence on
punishment, so that Stephen creates from the dual demands a series of rhymed phrases in repetitive form. The extremely
young artist begins to take shape almost immediately, and those factors that ultimately contribute to his potential as a
literary artist provide the selective material for the mode of Joycean portraiture.
The threat that an eagle will "pull out" his eyes creates a web of leitmotivs that weave outward from the introductory
node: at school the child with weak eyes fears the football that he views as a large and frightening bird, and, when he has
his glasses accidentally broken and is unable to do his class work, the punishment meted out by the prefect of studies
reinforces the threat of unjust authority: the instrument of punishment is a pandybat that one of the clerics refers to as a
"turkey." A Christmas turkey, however, figures prominently at the dinner at home during the vacation from his Jesuit
boarding school, longed-for respite that turns into an inexplicable trauma when political disagreement between members
of the family and guests erupts into heated vituperation, and a blinding spit-in-the-eye accentuates the unpleasantness for
Stephen. Just as his reaction to the threat of punishment goes unrecorded in the narrative elision, so now again he
remains mute in the face of the painful dilemma. An awareness of a disrupted universe, however, stays with him, and
even a ball of sweets can be pried into two halves. When he is unjustly pandied, Stephen undertakes to report the
transgression to higher authority, a rash action that he would probably not have considered previously, especially since


his father had once emphasized a gentlemanly code that legislated against such "peaching" on others. The split between
religion and nationalist politics in post-Parnell Ireland mirrors the divided and decaying home life of the Dedaluses and
will later accentuate conflicts between aesthetics and politics, between self and others, and various instances of divided
loyalties. Stephen becomes progressively aware of claims made on him by his family, nation, religion, friendsall of
which he eventually chooses to deny in an effort to forge for himself the role of an independent artist of lonely integrity.
The vague threats of eye-gouging eagles and pain-inflicting pandybats-dubbed-turkeys become specifically personified in
a schoolmate named Heron during Stephen's adolescence at a Jesuit day school in Dublin. Stephen notes that Heron not
only has a bird's name but that his face is like a bird's, and the association with previous "birds of prey" becomes
apparent when Heron teases Stephen about the attentions of a young girl (Emma has replaced the Eileen of the childish
transgression) and forces him to admit a relationship with her. By this time Stephen has attained stature as a scholar and
leader in his school, and he can parry the danger of the cane that Heron wields with a mocking replication of a religious
confession; but the incident recalls a previous instance when Stephen was far more vulnerable, and Heron wieded a
cabbage stump to force him to concede that Byron was immoral and consequently not worthy of poetic distinction.
With Heron now more easily disarmed by Stephen's ironic tone and lofty demeanor, the image of the punishing bird is
dispelled, and a new aspect of the heronlike bird appears to him in the form of a wading girl, whom he perceives as a
crane, with dove-tailed skirts, arousing his erotic appreciation as well as his veneration of the madonna facets of her
blue-and-white attire. His expression of joy is both sacred and profane, and the wading bird-girl assumes the balanced
pose of the artist's muse for Stephen Dedalus, as he turns away from the possibility of a priestly vocation to that of the
artist, "priest of eternal imagination."
The transition has not been an easy one for him, nor does the narrative give specific details of Stephen's changes of
mind and heart: narrative progression moves from highlight to highlight, alighting at the moments of revelation and
change, overpassing the transitional developments. Stephen's adolescent piety has brought him to the attention of the
Jesuit director of studies, with whom Stephen has an audience regarding the intimations of an ecclesiastical vocation.
Tempted by the image of himself as a Jesuit and the holder of vast powers as a priest, he is nonetheless put off by the
communal living and the subservience of himself to a higher authority, as well as by the mundane matters of physical
discomforts. The shrieking of a mad nun from a nearby asylum also filters into his consciousness, as does an image of
the Virgin spread "fowlwise" on a pole in the nearby slumsbird imagery and the figure of the madonna combined
yet no actual process of thought invades the "objectified" narrative. The veneer of piety that had called his masters'
attention to Stephen Dedalus had begun as an extreme reaction to his sexual guilt, but the pieties soon proved to be
mechanical and superficial, and imperceptibly they faded into irrelevance. The Stephen Dedalus interviewed by the Jesuit
director hovered between fixed points of direction, and the interview itself could have marked a point of departure.
What the attentive youth may have observed with a high degree of concentration was the habit of the director in looping
the curtain cord into a noose, as well as the shape of his skull in the waning light outlined against the window as a death's
head. A skull as a memento mori had graced the desk of the rector to whom Stephen as a child had appealed against the
unfair pandying, and, although the rector had promised to honor Stephen's petition for redress, the boy later learned that
the two priests laughed about the incident together; and the rector shared the joke with Stephen's father. Sensitive to
betrayals of any sort, Stephen may well have superimposed the director's skull upon the rector's death's head and decided
against joining the Society of Jesus. Whatever the subliminal process of decision-making operative within Stephen's
consciousness, the narrative process reveals only the epiphanic moments.
Readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have often been sensitive to a shift in narrative tone during the later
portions of the book, despite the note of objectivity retained in the free indirect style of the narration. While Joyce had
completed the first three chapters in 1908, at the age of twenty-six, it was not until 1914 that he was spurred into writing
the two final chapters, after plans were made to serialize the novel in the London magazine, the Egoist. The extended
distance of the author from his quasi-biographic protagonist in 1914 may account for elements of ironic treatment of the
haughty university student present in the last chapter, or Joyce may quite consciously have planned the development of
the treatment of Stephen to work outward from the "protected" handling of the delicate and sensitive child into the
more objective dealing with a young adult capable of maintaining his own position. The Stephen tormented by the
visions of damnation conjured up by his Jesuit mentors, resulting in nightmarish fits of vomiting and a desperate search
for absolution, is indeed a sympathetic figure demanding the reader's compassion, yet even as he seeks salvation Stephen
Dedalus goes far out of his way to find a chapel where he is not known. And the reader is at other times reminded that
the sharpened focus on Stephen's egocentric concerns has on occasion been momentarily extended to reveal that


although he was twice unfairly pandied, he also admits to having escaped various justifiable punishments, and that,
although he defended his choice of Byron as the best poet, he had previously attempted to avoid confrontation with the
safe choice of Cardinal Newman as the best writer of prose. Joyce's irony weaves its way through even the earlier
sections of the novel, expanding considerably, however, in the last chapter.
The elaborate concluding chapter of A Portrait of the Artist concentrates on the closing months of Stephen's career at
University College, and, as an extended narrative, it parallels the position of "The Dead" as the culminating novella of
Dubliners. Stephen's gentlemanly father has been changed into a disgruntled tyrant, and his loving mother to a
discontented woman, while a houseful of younger siblings share the poverty and squalor to which the Dedaluses have
been reduced. The priests and schoolmates of the boarding school in the first chapter had given way to the priests and
schoolmates of the day school in the middle chapters, and all of these have now been replaced by a completely new set
of teachers and students at the university. Stephen Dedalus moves through the text as the single figure of concentration,
all others existing temporarily only in relation to him. As he had his interviews with the rector and the director of studies
at the previous schools, here he has an almost inadvertent conference with the dean of studies, but now as a self-
sustained intellectual who politely masks his disdain for the lesser intellect of the English priest. His companions, among
the various students who range from misguided idealists to prospective job seekers, are four in particular who in their
own ways seek to enlist Stephen in their causes or influence his attitudes and opinions. Within the political arena one of
them argues the case for Irish nationalism, but Stephen dismisses the cause as the limited one of priests and peasants;
another argues for international socialism and world peace, but Stephen refuses to sign manifestos of any kind and
allows himself to be considered antisocial. On a more subjective scale the friend to whom Stephen explains his aesthetic
theories based on Aristotle and Aquinas instead holds out for the prospects of an eventual job and full belly, while the
friend to whom he reveals his personal aspirations and fears suggests to Stephen a course of expedient hypocrisy and
compromise. Stephen consequently announces his arrogantly individualist creed of "silence, exile, and cunning," insisting
on flying by all nets flung at his soul and refusing, like Lucifer, to serve any communal creed or established authority. His
image of himself is now that of a "hawklike man," an aloof bird of freedom, loneliness, and insecurity.
The emergence of Icarus (allied to Lucifer the fallen angel) as Stephen's symbolic totem echoes the use of an epigraph
from Ovid's Metamorphoses for A Portrait of the Artist (Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes"And he gave up his mind to
obscure arts"), a reference to the myth of Daedalus and Icarus's metamorphosis into birdlike creatures escaping the
confinement in Crete. The builder of the labyrinth stands for Stephen as a figure of the creative genius and a symbolic
father to whom he makes his final appeal as he is about to leave Ireland and embark on his new life and new career. The
closing portion of chapter five discards third-person narration to concentrate on Stephen's diary entries, a shift to first-
person perspective in the ironic literary language of the involved protagonist, telegraphic, conversational, anecdotal,
caustic, and in the end exaltational, yet on several occasions also compassionate, self-critical, and even self-lacerating.
Stephen's own aesthetic theories had concentrated on the development from the subjective to the objective, from the
lyrical mode to the epic to the dramatic mode; yet A Portrait of the Artist as a narrative text reverses the theoretical
proposition in order to heighten the lyrical subjectivity of Stephen's voice, undercutting his theoretical base.
That Stephen Dedalus remains at stage center of the first three chapters of Ulysses increases the renewed emphasis on the
lyrical mode and projects an extension of the young artist, two years after his abortive flight from Ireland. Nonetheless,
Joyce's first conception of the "Ulysses" story as a part of Dubliners attests to its position as a book about the extended
world outside the artist-hero, and the shift to the Leopold Bloom protagonist in the fourth chapter of Ulysses signals the
return to the larger universe, setting up the arena of interaction between the isolated artist and the mundane world. For
James Joyce the year 1914 was the beginning of his success as a writer, with the publication of Dubliners and the
completion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (already being serialized), as well as his beginning of work on Ulysses.
Ironically, 1914 was also the year the lights went out in Europe with the beginning of World War I and the beginning of
Joyce's precarious position as a British subject in the Italian city of Trieste under Austro-Hungarian rule.
For Joyce the transition into Ulysses went smoothly as he forged an amalgam between the world of Dubliners and the
extended persona of Stephen Dedalus, and he needed one or two structural devices for the development of the new
fiction. By this time, however, he envisioned a far more complex format in which to capture the modern world, and he
compounded numerous structural devices for Ulysses, the most basic being the consolidation of his materials into a single
day in the city of Dublin and its environs (Thursday, 16 June 1904), a day that had been facilely tagged "the dailiest day
possible." The most elaborate structure was his use of Homer's Odyssey as an underlying grid for the depiction of a quite


nonheroic day in an equally nonheroic world, with an "Odysseus" figure who was apparently very much an ordinary
citizen. Despite the presence of Stephen Dedalus once again, it is Leopold Bloomand his memorable wife, Mollyat
the center of the Odyssean epic of Joyce's contemporary world. Joyce's use of formal structures, systematized in the
schema that he prepared for his biographer and for analysts of the book, was nonetheless undercut by his imaginative
virtuosity as a writer. Although Dublin is the focal center of the novel, four of the chapters (including the first three)
take place outside the city, and the time frame is equally inexact: the morning hours with which Ulysses begins are
duplicated for each of the two male protagonists, and only after noon does time flow chronologically and unduplicated,
although with certain gaps, until the novel ends in the small hours of the next morning. The flow of time, like the firm
situation in space, is subject to variations, disruptions, and faulty transitions, almost a human variable introduced to
dislocate the fixed patterns that control the tightly organized elements of the text. Human fallibility is invariably
operative in Joyce's epic, which is also a mock-epic, but nonetheless epical.
The relationship between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey is signaled primarily by the book's title, and even that
allows for a certain distancingthe use of the Roman name for the hero suggests a "translation" in language, culture,
and geography from the original. Joyce reduced Homer's twenty-four books to eighteen chapters, and one of these
focuses on an event that Homer's hero has specifically avoided, passage through the unpredictable "wandering rocks."
The patterning of a three-part text follows the Homeric mold: the three opening chapters dealing exclusively with
Stephen comprise the Telemachia; the central twelve chapters focusing primarily on Bloom but bringing Stephen into an
eventual relationship to him form the Odyssey proper; and the last three chapters, which return Bloom home with
Stephen in tow, parallel the Nostos. Joyce had originally designated a Homeric title for each of the eighteen chapters
(and these were in actual use in 1918-1920, when Ulysses was being serialized in the Little Review), but they were deleted
for the book, like scaffolding kicked away. Nonetheless, the titles are still employed as a critical convenience:
Telemachus, Nestor, and Proteus (The Telemachia); Calypso, Lotus Eaters, Hades, Aeolus, Lestrygonians, Scylla and
Charybdis, Wandering Rocks, Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa, Oxen of the Sun, and Circe (The Odyssey); Eumaeus, Ithaca,
and Penelope (The Nostos). The centrality of Homer's text to that of Joyce's Ulysses has been strongly emphasized by
some critics, the parody of a heroic epic in a novel of the mundane world by others, and the mere casualness of
associations by still others. Odysseus's descent into the underworld allows (in the Hades chapter) for a funeral cortege
through Dublin to bury an insignificant citizen in the Catholic cemetery, and numerous colloquialisms and cliches
regarding death abound in the narrative. As Bloom hungrily wends his way toward lunch in the Lestrygonians chapter,
hundreds of words suggesting food crop up in the oddest ways, his mind unable to ignore his stomach; the cannibalism
of Homer's Lestrygonians is replicated in an unsanitary eatery, where Bloom looks in and retreats in revulsion. The Circe
chapter introduces a brothel mistress who figuratively turns men into swine, and the Penelope chapter contains the night
thoughts of Molly Bloom, whose unfaithfulness with her new lover on this day distinguishes her from Odysseus's
Penelope, although it may well prove to have been Molly's first infidelity ever. Parallel and parody, pastiche and travesty
are all aspects of Joyce's handling of the Homeric materials in Ulysses.
Ulysses is at once a comic and a cosmic novel, and the Odyssey is not the only parallel text that tracks the life of Stephen
Dedalus, the Blooms, and the other Dublin citizens. Leopold Bloom has his analogues in Moses, Christ, Elijah, the
Wandering Jew, Sinbad the Sailor, as well as Odysseus, while Stephen is recognizable at times as playing the roles of
Hamlet, Icarus, Lucifer, Siegfried, the Prodigal Son, as well as Telemachus (late in the book Stephen and Bloom will look
into the same mirror and see the magical reflection of William Shakespeare). Molly is the Virgin Mary, the Daughter of
the Regiment, Gea- Tellus the Earth Mother, and the Wife of Bath. Most of these associations are subtle and even
tenuous, and in many ways the three principal characters in the novel are some of the most realistically drawn figures in
literary fiction. Ulysses has its primary existence on the literaleven the naturalisticlevel, and the complex allusive
system, and various other structural and stylistic innovations which distinguish the book as a revolutionary and
modernistic work, are firmly established on that basic plot level. Although the modernist movement perfected the nearly
plotless novel, Ulysses retains its fully proportioned (although antiheroic) story line. Glimpses into Stephen's thoughts
and snatches of conversation throughout the novel recover the events between his having left for Paris to study
medicine and his presence in Ireland, temporarily resident in a coastal tower which he shares with its renter, Malachi
(Buck) Mulligan, and teaching in a genteel boy's school further down the coast. He has been called back because of his
mother's illness and he has watched her die. The supposition that he refused her request that he pray at her bedside
contributes to his guilt and the presence of his mother's "ghost" in his conscience. Moody and disgruntled, he plans to
abandon his tenure at the tower and his friendship with Mulligan, and he finds himself almost as displeased with his
ineffectual position as a teacher. Since it is Thursday, a half-day at the school, he wends his way into Dublin, where he


tries to avoid Mulligan and their English guest, and, although he still considers himself a potential poet, he spends most
of the day talking and drinking. His drunkenness results in a horrible vision of his dead mother that he exorcises by
smashing a lamp in a brothel and in being knocked down by a British soldier in the streets of the red-light district. A
worried and solicitous Bloom rescues Stephen and takes him home with him, but after a convivial talk and cup of cocoa
Stephen refuses the offer of a night's lodgings, going off into the early morning homeless, friendless, and (by choice)
jobless, once again on the verge of a new departure, still the proponent of silence, exile, and cunning.
The Leopold Bloom whose arc crosses Stephen's path on this day is a thirty-eight-year-old advertising canvasser, whose
job allows him to voyage through the streets of Dublin most of the day, but who also assumes that he must keep away
from home most of the afternoon and evening as well because of his wife's assignation with her concert manager, which
he assumes is a lovers' tryst as well. The inevitability of Molly's infidelity intrudes on his thoughts, minimally in the
morning as he prepares for attending the funeral, but more potently in the afternoon as he pursues an advertising
agreement and seeks the comforts of lunch and an early dinner. At three instances during these wanderings his path
crosses that of Stephen Dedalus (with whose father he shares a carriage in the funeral cortege), and on three occasions it
crosses that of Blazes Boylan, Molly's prospective lover, whom he assiduously avoids until he sees him entering a pub at
the exact time of the assignation with Molly. Fascinated by Boylan's being in the wrong place, Bloom spies upon him
from the adjoining dining room and watches him depart for a late arrival at the Bloom residence. Mild-mannered and
pacifistic Bloom has little connection with the Jewish heritage that his father had renounced before his birth (born
Protestant, Bloom converted to Catholicism to marry Molly, but remains essentially agnostic), yet when confronted by
virulent anti-Semitism later in the afternoon, Leopold Bloom vociferously stands his ground and denounces intolerance
and hatred against a hostile pub group who have convinced themselves that Bloom (hardly ever a betting man) has won
handsomely on a dark horse and still refuses to stand rounds of drinks.
Bloom's evening is spent as a good Samaritan straightening out an insurance muddle for the widow of the recently
buried man and inquiring at the maternity hospital about a woman who had been in labor for three days. In the hospital
refectory he encounters a drinking party of medical students, among them the seriously drunk Stephen, whom he
solicitously follows into the brothel district. When the revived Stephen leaves Bloom's house hours later, Leopold
Bloom prepares for bed, surveying the damage to his life made by the intrusion of Boylan, but also the death in infancy
of his son almost eleven years ago, the suicide of his father years before, and even the departure of his fifteen-year-old
daughter, Milly, for an apprenticeship at a photographer's. The death of the boy has been haunting Bloom's thoughts,
and the circumstances of his having been born deformed have convinced Bloom that he was responsible for that
deformity. Consequently he avoided allowing Molly to conceive another child, as much as he has longed for a son and
heir; and the sexual life of the Blooms has been erratic and insubstantial (Bloom has practiced interrupted coitus,
apparently without Molly's comprehending his reasons). Aware of her dissatisfaction with their sexual cohabitation,
Bloom has systematically arranged for Molly to meet Boylan and has sent Milly off to her apprenticeship so that the
house might be free for the adulterous liaison. The reader's awareness of this complex rationale for the surface behavior
of Leopold and Molly Bloom depends on perceiving and connecting isolated bits of information and buried inferences
during the progress of this "dailiest day possible," as well as reading literal events and suggestions of motivation through
the dense stylistics that progressively develop throughout Ulysses.
From 1914 until its publication in book form in 1922, Ulysses underwent a series of changes, as did the Europe that
experienced the prolonged war and its aftermath of revolution and uneasy peace, and the Joyce family, as it moved from
Trieste to Zurich and back, until Joyce agreed to Ezra Pound's suggestion that to live in Paris would mean living at the
center of the cultural maelstrom. Despite the emergence of such revolutionary movements as futurism and dada, and the
publication of the early poetry of Eliot and Pound, nothing quite prepared the English-reading world for the appearance
of Ulysses, which, with the publication the same year of Eliot's The Waste Land, marked 1922 as the peak year of high
modernism. The publication history in itself was constantly eventful: serialization in the Little Review was stopped by
court action in America; copies were burned on the docks in England; a pirated serialization was protested by many of
the world's intellectuals. It was not until a 1933 court decision declared that it was not obscene that Ulysses was published
in the United States.
Salacious obscenity proved less of a hindrance thereafter than stylistic obscurity, although the first six chapters, despite
Joyce's later revisions in the light of the later styles, still seem free from most of the difficulties of the succeeding
chapters. The use of interior monologue intrudes almost immediately (actually with just a single word injected into one


of the first paragraphs), and is easily assimilated into the narration and dialogue to form a triangularization of action,
speech, and thought that remains relatively consistent for the first six chapters (what Joyce oversimplified in a letter to
his patroness as "the initial style"), the first three chapters focusing exclusively on Stephen, the next three on Bloom.
With the Aeolus chapter major changes become apparent as a series of sixty-three newspaper captions are intercalated
into text, as befits the environment of a newspaper office, and the reader senses that the mechanical movement of the
presses, inserting and withdrawing, complements the windy slamming of doors and the windy rhetoric of the hangers-on
in the editorial offices. Stephen and Bloom share the arena, not only with each other but also with a larger segment of
the general public, and, as the chapter opens with the approach and arrival of Bloom, it ends with the departure from the
offices of Stephen, leading several others along with him as he narrates a recently conceived "parable." Organic
structuring devices develop in every chapter on an individually conceived basis, a series of eighteen interlocked but
discrete entities.
The two chapters that follow the Aeolus chapter seem to return to an established norm, the first concentrating wholly
on Bloom, and the second on Stephen with Bloom intruding occasionally. Yet the Lestrygonians chapter allows for a
few momentsas had the Hades chapterfor various Dubliners to gossip a bit about Bloom while he is out of earshot,
the compilation of fragments of external data about him and Molly accumulating in the process of the narrative. The
Scylla and Charybdis chapter, located in the National Library director's office, again features Stephen as public
performer, holding forth on his theories about Shakespeare, with sudden stylistic changes deriving from the
Shakespearean atmosphere: narrational prose broken into drama dialogue, stage directions, dramatis personae, as well as
elided words and names moving to Elizabethan rhythms and dance steps. A dramatic tension develops between
Stephen's monologue and his private thoughts while extemporizing. Audience intrusions create still another area of
tension, in a scene in which the Dublin intelligentsia of Joyce's day are physically present in the fictional resetting. More
real people are mentioned in the library chapter than in any other in Ulysses, a dominance of the historical world over the
fictional one but subsumed within the fiction that Stephen weaves around the life of William Shakespeare.
The remaining daylight chapters increase the degree of innovative changes and emphasize the individuated stylistic
natures of each new segment. As the "central" divider of the chapters, the Wandering Rocks chapter calls attention to
itself not only because it is segmented into nineteen separate units, each with its own cast of characters, but because both
Stephen and Bloom are minor elements in a street scene featuring a cross section of Dublin humanity, four of whom are
allowed the distinction of an individual monologuea privilege hitherto enjoyed only by the two major figures. The
distortions of the next chapter, however, are far more severe, as the Sirens determine the musicality of its language, even
to the extent that broken bits of words and phrases introduce the chapter as incoherent sounds, later given coherence
when found within their formulated contexts. Although compounded sound waves seem to warp the consistency of the
narrative, a semblance of objective narration is sustained throughout the Sirens chapter, consistent with the rest of the
text; but in Cyclops narrative responsibility is taken over by an anonymous character with a low-Dublin accent and a
nasty tongue, speaking in the first person and focusing the perspective virulently against Bloom. Yet he in turns is
interrupted at twenty-two instances in which outrageous parodies intrude as commentaries on the action, each taken
from a literary form of sorts, including journalistic, folkloristic, legalistic, epical, and biblical. After a gap of several hours,
as twilight falls, the Nausicaa chapter adds to the dislocation of narrative stance: a saccharine feminine voice deriving
from Victorian women's magazines takes command in telling the story of the girls on the beach and the intrusive male
presence, but it fades out with the exit of the women; and the familiar mode of Bloom's internal monologue returns after
a long absence. In the ensuing darkness his thoughts become somber and somnolent, highly introspective and moody,
paralleling those of Stephen Dedalus alone in the same area in the Proteus chapter.
The night world of Ulysses intensifies the stylistic aberrations as each new chapter creates a world of its own. The random
intrusions of parodic giganticism in the Cyclops chapter anticipate the systemized form of literary pastiche in the Oxen
of the Sun chapter, with stylistic changes every paragraph or so, tracking the nine-hundred years of English prose styles,
so that the fabricated voices of writers as diverse as Mandeville and Malory, Bunyan and Swift, Lamb and Pater, succeed
each other in affecting the mode of narration. The density of styles mirrors the degrees of drunkenness in the hospital
commons room, until the horde of medicals pours out of the building and into the nearest pub, and is characterized in
the closing moments of the scene by the disintegration of language into vulgar colloquialisms and distorted dialects. The
loss of a consistent narrative voice becomes complete in the Circe chapter where everything is presented totally in
dramatic form as a distended psychodrama, dredging up ghostly figures from the past, projecting hypothetical characters
and even inanimate objects, recapitulating the previous events in the lives of the protagonists through appearances and


disappearances, entrances and exits, as hundreds of apparitions strut the hallucinatory stage. And just as the dramatic
mode fixes the narrative locus in characterized voices, direct narration of a sort reenters through the convention of stage
directions, undercutting the autonomy of the drama. In contradistinction, the style of the Eumaeus chapter affects an
inflated literary pose full of overextended sentences, foreign language phrases, and cliches, reflecting Bloom's social
gregariousness in the face of Stephen's sullenness, and yet the Ithaca chapter contains the most depersonalized style yet
exhibited in Ulysses: a catechetical coupling of 309 questions and answers presented as disembodied information
disclosing the events in Bloom's house upon his return with Stephen, their conversation and individual thoughts, as well
as catalogues of facts and figures pertaining to their immediate environment. By contrast, Molly's night thoughts
consume all of the concluding chapter, a feminine interior monologue of eight run-on sentences, devoid of punctuation
but replete with her own expressive desires and past history, at once a corrective to the entire masculine text that
precedes it and a mysterious departure into a private and unique consciousness. Through the multiple styles of the night
chapters, the minimal plotline is carefully advanced, but the numerous suppositions that have threaded their way through
Ulysses are either resolved or intensified, while numerous new possibilities and contingencies are introduced. Joyce has
added to the inconclusive endings of "The Dead" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a new stage of irresolution
for Ulysses.
During the seventeen years he spent writing Finnegans Wake. Joyce lived in a Paris well known for its avant-garde
enthusiasms and excesses, for which Joyce served as a reluctant high priest, at once part of the constituent body of the
magazine transition, in which seventeen segments of the then untitled Work in Progress appeared, and yet quietly aloof
from all manifestos and movements. With the success of Ulysses and financial remunerations he established himself in
Paris and vacationed yearly at various resorts, while the pattern of changing addresses continued as it had in Trieste and
Zurichas indeed it had in his father's residences in Dublin. Work on the work-in-progress was sporadic and desultory,
delayed often enough by health problems that Joyce even considered handing over the incomplete project to Irish
author James Stephens for completion. Begun in the year that Ireland was wrenching itself free from the British Empire
and in the throes of wrenching itself apart, and as Mussolini was establishing fascism in Italy, Finnegans Wake was finally
concluded, titled, and published on the eve of World War II. Whether a Chapelizod pubkeeper's dream or an erotic
history of mankind or a pub yarn endlessly woven through a plethora of pub yarns, tall tales, and multifaceted narratives,
Finnegans Wake obliquely subsumes the political events of the years of its composition, folding them away within a
multitude of events from time immemorial.
The degree of innovation in Finnegans Wake is extraordinary, so much so that it remains the single most difficult text of
the modernist period and is in a sense unreadable, although eminently suitable for analysis. The book challenges and
changes our modes of reading, requiring on the one hand the explicative methods employed in reading poetry and on
the other a suspension of disbelief that allows the reader to open and reopen constantly the possibilities and
multiplicities of interpretation. Some sections were rewritten numerous times, each revision further elaborating and
complicating the texture of the narrative; others in the later stages of composition emerged as thoroughly convoluted
constructions ready to be fit into the completed pattern unchanged, as Joyce sought both to perfect a single unified work
and constantly to alter the conditions of literary response with every segment of the text. Unlike Ulysses, it was written
out of sequence, in bits and pieces and fixed set pieces, all of which Joyce eventually sewed together under a title that he
kept secret, insisting that he had a schematic plan in mind throughout. Serious critical attention has been focused on the
assumption that nothing in Finnegans Wake is nonsense, yet it may be equally true that it is all pure nonsense, subsuming
and perpetually violating the limitation of prosaic "sense." Readers and critics have attempted consistently to "translate"
Joyce's language into what he had dismissed as "wideawake" language and have condemned some aspects of his
tampering with language as trivial when something less than direct explication emerged from their frustrated efforts.
Joyce has been credited with and accused of destroying the English language, the language of the British conquerors of
Ireland, and rebelling against everything bourgeois, even its esteemed language system; but Joyce himself claimed that
what he destroyed in the writing of Finnegans Wake he also reconstructed, and the result is the creation of a language,
what he called a night language, but commentators on occasion refer to it as dream language. From the closing passages
of the Oxen of the Sun chapter through the four succeeding chapters, various night languages were stylistically
developed in Ulysses to contain the night world; and for Finnegans Wake a new night language, encompassing multiple
variants, takes precedence. Joyce explained that he was turning away from "wideawake" day language, adding that he was
also abandoning its "cutanddry" grammar. Many sentences in the text can still respond to the diagramming of a literal
grammarian, but others defy artificial structuring, although the long, overly extended and complex "sentences" often give


the impression of having a syntactical flow. Night language always "approximates" actual apprehension, a sense of an
operative reality, a movement toward conceptualization and confinement, but always eludes the actual, the definite, the
defined.
Just as early evaluations of Ulysses focused on its chaotic randomness, despite the highly schematized structures now
apparent, so Finnegans Wake appears to be an uncharted minefield. The sense of a structure depends on the division into
four parts, the final one a single chapter ending in an incomplete sentence. Joyce indicated that the four-part structure
was intentional and implicated Giambattista Vico's cycles of history as germane to the pattern. Book one is viewed as
corresponding to Vico's theocratic age (The Book of the Parents), book two to an heroic age (The Book of the Sons),
and book three as a democratic age (The Book of the People), with book four as a Recorso. The pattern holds up
marginally well: indeed the first four chapters seem to introduce an arriving hero in Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,
displacing vaguer heroic figures from a prehistoric past, who settles down, raises a family, and at a certain time in the
recent past has committed an indiscretion of some sort that has volatile repercussions. The next four chapters apparently
recapitulate these "events," but already in terms of his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, and his children, twin sons Shaun and
Shem and a younger daughter Issy. Book two situates a particular evening during which the now much older children are
at play and at their lessons before going to bed, and the pubkeeper Earwicker, at his bar with his customers, gets drunk
and passes out, eventually finding his way upstairs to bed. Book three carries through the night, Earwicker's drunken
dream reactivating his feelings of guilt, until an early morning scene reveals the parents in bed disturbed by an awakened
child, time reverted to their early marriage days. Book four suggests a "real" dawn breaking on Chapelizod, and the
flowing of the River Liffey out into Dublin Bay.
No plot summary, no matter how concise or how elaborately exhaustive, can capture the narrative condition in which
there is no single narrative. On the one hand the digressions and interruptions return to the basic plot of one family of
five, plus two servants of sorts (the charwoman a vaguely grandparental figure as well), and a dozen customers that may
also include four old men; yet on the other hand the tale of Earwicker misbehaving with two girls in the park, overseen
by three soldiers who spread the tale until a cad accosts Earwicker in the same park and manages some sort of
accusation, never gets told despite the 600-odd pages of Finnegans Wake narration. All other tales participate in and
diverge from the hint of a central narrative, and the multiplicity of characters with numerous tales to tell, on and off the
subject, contribute to an oral history of the world, filtered through a universal language attempting to duplicate the
nonverbal qualities of the world of dreams. The shift that Joyce made from the narrative method of Stephen Hero to A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a shift from linear progression to a smaller series of compartmentalized packages
of discrete units, a method elaborated upon in Ulysses and perfected in Finnegans Wake. Rather than a continuous
narrative, Finnegans Wake consists of packets of linked, blended, and interrupted tales, some no more complete than a
single phrase, and a melange of voices performing narrational services independent of any central intention. Not only
does Finnegans Wake contain multitudes, but these multitudes interact and interconnect at junctures determined by
accidental and coincidental factors, the net result of which is an almost seamless garment that the chapter separations
only minimally affect. The four-part structuring implied by the segregation into books is both corroborated and belied by
an "unseen" structuring that runs parallel with the more obvious one: instances of the word silence that serve as caesuras
to the narratives and as bridges between them. They occur spaced out at four points in the text, the word never spelled
the same way twice or positioned the same way twice in a sentence or paragraph, suggesting a lapse between eons, a new
starting point between agesand hence between tales told.
Reading Finnegans Wake has been likened to collecting sand in a sieve, and experienced readers have learned to read
selectively, searching for specific threads or clusters at each reading. Some have persistently attempted to read the "plot"
of Finnegans Wake and establish a chronology for the Earwicker family situation that straightens out the time warps of
Joyce's method of presentation, to obtain cameo descriptions of the principal characters, and to determine the events of
the Earwicker indiscretion and its reverberations. Others have sought major themes, which they find surfacing
throughout: the endurance and flexibility of humankind; the comic foibles of human pretensions; the absurdity of
feelings of guilt in a fallible universe; the monumental achievement of the building of cities or, conversely, the futility of
man's accomplishments in the face of the relentless permanence of nature; the vying of brothers for rights of succession;
the supplanting of fathers by sons; the woman as temptress, provoker of violence, healer and bringer of peace; the
rivalry of mothers and nubile daughters; the eternal presence of man and woman in the natural landscape as mountain
and river. Occasionally a reader decides that Finnegans Wake has a central theme or dominant messagethat it is
essentially about the Easter Passion or the Irish Civil War, the Book of the Dead or the "Ballad of Tim Finnegan": each of


these interpretations tends to narrow the focus of an otherwise expansive universe contained in Finnegans Wake, yet every
effort to capture the expansiveness can result in the loss of too many grains of Wakean sand.
All exigencies in Finnegans Wake remain continually operative: Earwicker guilty or innocent, captured or absconded,
executed or exonerated; the crime a misdemeanor or felony, the sin venial or mortal. Whatever occurred may take the
form of a civil disorder, a moral offense, a commercial manipulation, a tragedyand yet only as a staged piece of
dramatic literature, a story enactedor only a rumor of scandal, a bruiting about of a bit of gossip, the echo of a fall in
the Garden of Eden. Nor is there any real evidence that anything actually happened (or will happen) or that there is any
actual narrative possible from the disjointed clues spread throughout the text. Instead of narrative events Finnegans Wake
may essentially be a network of thematic structures held together by narrative bits from preexisting texts, the cultural
flotsam and jetsam of human civilization, its literary and oral storytelling traditions. The fall of Earwicker parallels the
fall of Adam from grace in the Garden of Eden, the crucifixion of Christ at Calvary, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo,
the fall of Humpty Dumpty from the wall. At ground level the motif involves the Irish-American ballad of the
hodcarrier Tim Finnegan, whose fall from a ladder and subsequent death occasion a wake at which a bottle of whiskey
the water of lifeis hurled during a fracas and smashes over the corpse, the spilled whiskey restoring him to life. To
complement the mundane Finnegan there exists the Irish hero Finn MacCool, the buried giant whose form is the Dublin
cityscape and whose anticipated resurrection is expected to signal the revival of the Irish nation. In the Wakean universe
exalted things above are mirrored in the commonplace things below. Finnegans Wake constantly gives the impression of a
rhythmic flow on infinite variation, of stylistic changes from section to section, from paragraph to paragraph, and even
within individual sentences, areas of increased density and murkiness, relieved occasionally by pockets of near lucidity.
Whatever plans Joyce may have had for a work to follow Finnegans Wake remain a mystery, although some rumors
persisted after his death in 1941: he is presumed to have commented that his next book would be a simple one, and also
that, having written a book about a river in Finnegans Wake, his next project would be a book about the sea. Not as
frequently quoted is a remark that he made during the valiant resistance of the Greeks to the invasion by Fascist Italy:
that he was contemplating the writing of a Greek tragedy. In the year-and-a-half interval between the publication of
Finnegans Wake and his death Joyce was a war refugee on the move, worried about hospitalization for his daughter and
finding a neutral nation that would accept him and his family. He may well have assumed that he was terminally illa
fear that he could not voice lest the Swiss refuse entry to a moribund refugee. Worried that the war was eclipsing the
sales and fame of his new book, Joyce may also have been aware that Finnegans Wake would have no successor. As A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had established his reputation among a small circle of intellectuals, Ulysses had brought
international fame and notoriety, a combination that proved effective in placing James Joyce in the primary role as the
major modernist writer of his age; and in the four decades after his death that reputation has strengthened considerably.
The first half of the twentieth century produced such modernist masters as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Thomas
Mann, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Federico Garcia Lorca, Wallace Stevens, and William
Faulkner; yet just as the period in art persists as the Age of Picasso, so the period in literature should be primarily
recognized as the Age of Joyce.

Source Citation:
Benstock, Bernard. "James Joyce." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold.

"James Joyce," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 36: British Novelists, 1890-1929: Modernists, edited by Thomas F.
Staley, Gale Research Company, 1985, pp. 80-104.
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, volume(s) 8:166, 170; 35:144, 147, 159, 163, 166-67, 190, 197; 159:275-76, 361
World Literature Criticism, volume(s) 3:1930
Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 3:205, 226, 231, 234, 247-48; 26:46-7; 44:265, 284, 288; 64:222, 233, 242
Short Stories for Students, volume(s) 19:58-


Criticism by Harry Levin
James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, revised edition, New Directions, 1960, 256 p.
[Levin is an American educator and critic whose works reveal his wide range of interests and expertise, from Renaissance
culture to the contemporary novel. Among his best-known critical works is James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1941), a
work partly inspired by Joyce's comment that Levin had written the best review of Finnegans Wake. In the following
excerpt from the revised and enlarged edition of James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, Levin presents an overview of the
literary techniques, subjects, and themes of Dubliners. ]
The reader of Joyce is continually reminded of the analogy between the role of the artist and the priestly office. The
focal situation of Dubliners is that described in "Araby," where we walk through the streets of the city, glimpsing places
"hostile to romance" through the eyes of a child: "These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined
that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes." The same symbol is given a darker purport in the first story of
the book, "The Sisters," when it is recalled that the dying priest had disgraced himself by breaking a chalice. The broken
chalice is an emblem, not only of Joyce's interrupted communion, but of the parched life of the metropolitan Waste
Land. This early story is also glimpsed from the point of view of a small boy. The very first sentence consists entirely of
monosyllables, and the paragraph proceeds toward a childish fascination with the word "paralysis."
Joyce's intention, he told his publisher, "was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin
for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis" [see excerpt dated 1906]. In every one of these
fifteen case histories, we seem to be reading in the annals of frustrationa boy is disappointed, a priest suffers disgrace,
the elopement of "Eveline" fails to materialize. Things almost happen. The characters are arrested in mid-air; the author
deliberately avoids anything like an event. In "The Boarding House"when there is some hope of a weddingthe
aggressive landlady, the compromised daughter, and the abashed young man are presented in turn, and an actual
interview becomes unnecessary. Joyce's slow-motion narrative is timed to his paralyzed subject. Both are synchronized
with his strangely apocalyptic doctrine, which assigns to both author and characters a passive part. The author merely
watches, the characters are merely revealed, and the emphasis is on the technique of exposure.
Realism had already established the artist as an observer; naturalism made him an outsider. In contrast to the
promiscuous documentation of earlier novelists, the tranche de vie ["slice of life"] was sliced thin. A writer like Balzac,
claiming to be only the secretary of society, could take a rather officious view of his position. The modern writer stands
apart, waiting for a chance encounter or a snatch of conversation to give his story away. Strictly speaking, he has no
story, but an oblique insight into a broader subject. Things happen just as they always dothe things you read about in
the papers. There is business as usual, but it is none of his business. He is not concerned with romantic adventure or
dramatic incident. He is concerned with the routines of every-day life, the mechanisms of human behavior, and he is
anxious to discover the most economical way of exposing the most considerable amount of that material.
This is simply an attempt to define what is so often referred to as the nuance. The epiphany, in effect, is the same device.
Though grounded in theology, it has now become a matter of literary technique. It has become Joyce's contribution to
that series of developments which convert narrative into short-story, supplant plot with style, and turn the raconteur into
a candid-camera expert. The measure of success, in so attenuated a form, is naturally the degree of concentration. The
achievements of Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, or Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter, can almost be
computed in terms of specific gravity. And Joyce, with "Two Gallants," can say as much in fifteen pages as James T.
Farrell has been able to tell us in volume after volume. It is hard to appreciate the originality of Joyce's technique,
twenty-five years after the appearance of Dubliners, because it has been standardized into an industry. This industry is
particularly well equipped to deal with the incongruities and derelictions of metropolitan life. Its typical products are the
shrewd Parisian waifs of Les hommes de bonne volonte and the well-meaning nonentities who blunder through the pen and
pencil sketches of the New Yorker.
In their own way, the tangential sketches of Dubliners came as close to Joyce's themethe estrangement of the artist
from the cityas does the systematic cross-section of Ulysses. They look more sympathetically into the estranged lives


of others. They discriminate subtly between original sin and needless cruelty. "Counterparts," in its concatenation of
petty miseries, suggests the restrained pathos of Chekhov's "Enemies": it begins with an employer rebuking a clerk, and
endsafter several drunken roundswith the clerk beating his little son. Joyce's point of view, like Dickens', is most
intimately associated with the children of his stories. He arranged his book under four aspectschildhood, adolescence,
maturity, and public life. As the stories detach themselves, they assume what Joyce called "a style of scrupulous
meanness." But "the special odour of corruption," in which he took pride, was by no means peculiar to Dublin. It was
also endemic in middlewestern villages like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. ...
If the vices of Dublin are those of any modern city, the virtues of "the seventh city of Christendom" are unique. An
unconscionable amount of talking and singing and drinking goes on in Dubliners. This promotes style and poetry and
fantasyall peculiarly Irish qualities, and talents of Joyce. "The imagination of the people and the language they use is
rich and living," Synge was discovering. The richness of Irish conversation mitigates the sordid realities of Joyce's book.
He was always ready to take full advantage of the common speech of his fellow townsmenthe most expressive English
he could have encountered anywhere. He could always portray life most vividly when he was writing by ear. What seems
an aimless political discussion, in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," is really tight dramatic exposition. In the end the
dead figure of Parnell dominates the campaign headquarters. It is his birthday, and an amateur poet is persuaded to recite
a maudlin and mediocre eulogy. The finishing touch is the comment of the hostile Conservative, when pressed for his
opinion: "Mr. Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing."
Notice the irony, so frequent with Swift, in the use of indirect discourse. In Joyce's attitude, however, there is an
underlying ambiguity: he eats his cake and has it. We, too, are moved by the poem, in spite ofor perhaps because of
its cheapness. We are asked to share both the emotion and the revulsion. In "Clay," with a different situation, we are
subjected to the same treatment. The epiphany is no more than the moment when an old laundress stands up and sings
"I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls." She is made to boast of wealth, rank, beauty, and lovenone of which she has
ever possessed"in a tiny quavering voice." A listener, affected by this pathetic incongruity, explains his tears by
remarking that there is "no music for him like poor old Balfe." Here, as so often in Joyce, the music is doing duty for the
feeling. The feeling is deliberately couched in a cheap phrase or a sentimental song, so that we experience a critical
reaction, and finally a sense of intellectual detachment. Emotionally sated, we shy away from emotion.
Such passages have the striking and uncertain effect of romantic irony. Jean Paul's formula"hot baths of sentiment
followed by cold showers of irony"still describes them. They show Joyce, in his isolation from society, confronted by
the usual romantic dichotomy between the emotional and the intellectual. At his hands, the problem becomes a
characteristically verbal one, which allows him to dwell upon the contrast between the rich connotations and the
disillusioning denotations of words. Since the days of Don Quixote this has been a major premise for fiction. The point
of "Araby" is the glamor of the name, and the undeception of the small boy when he learns that it stands for a prosaic
church bazaar. Yet no disillusionment would seem cruel enough to justify the last sentence, which should be contrasted
with the objective description of Mr. Crofton's comment: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven
and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
Another point is scored by the same method in "Grace," where the distance measured lies between the benign
effulgence of religious doctrine and the hangover which brings a group of businessmen back to church. The distinction
between words and things, in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and in "Grace," is ground for political and religious
satire. Church and state should enrich the lives of the citizens and impose a pattern on the city, but for Joyce they are
tarnished symbols, broken chalices. Meanwhile, the Dubliners go their own ways. Martin Cunningham, the prominent
layman, goes to church in "Grace" and appears at the funeral in Ulysses. Bartell D'Arcy, the tenor, sings a few hoarse
notes in "The Dead" and figures in Mrs. Bloom's reminiscences. Mr. O'Madden Burke goes on writing for his paper, and
Lenehan goes from bar to bar and book to book.
Joyce puts himself into his early book, not directly this time, but as he might have been if he had remained a Dubliner.
Mr. Duffy, the timid socialist clerk in "A Painful Case," is translating Michael Kramer. He meets a lady whose husband
does not understand her, and who for some reason bears the name of Joyce's Italian music-master, Sinico. Though he
considers falling in love with her, he continues to brood on "the soul's incurable loneliness." One day he reads in the
newspaper that she has been killed in an accident of her own seekingagain the title is an echo. Again, in Ulysses, we


hear of her funeral. Death is one of the few things that happen in Dubliners; it is the subject of the first and last stories
in the volume. The last and longest story, "The Dead," concerns the brother of a priest we meet in Ulysses. Gabriel
Conroy is a Stephen Dedalus who stayed on to teach school and write occasional reviews, and who is already beginning
to show symptoms of middle age. He is a pompous master of ceremonies at the Christmas party of his musical maiden
auntsincidentally Joyce'sand godmothers of Stephen Dedalus. Among others, he meets there a girl he knew, a
Gaelic student who earnestly upbraids him for having taken his holidays abroad.
But he is a less significant character than his wife, Gretta, and she is not so significant as a memory awakened in her by a
snatch of song at the end of the evening. It is the memory of a boy named Michael Furey, who had once loved her and
who had died. Gabriel, who had not known of him before, feels a pang of the soul's incurable loneliness. He can never
participate in this buried experience, even though it has become a part of the person he has known most intimately; he
suddenly recognizes that he and Gretta are strangers. And, as he tries to imagine the dead boy, he realizes that his own
identity is no more palpable to others than Michael Furey's is to him. In the light of this epiphany, the solid world seems
to dissolve and dwindle, until nothing is left except the relics of the dead and the hosts of the dying. "One by one, they
were all becoming shades." The final paragraph, in slow, spectral sentences, cadenced with alliteration and repetition,
takes a receding view of the book itself. It sets up, like most departures, a disturbing tension between the warm and
familiar and the cold and remote. In one direction lies the Class of Elements at Clongowes Wood, in the other the
Universe:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the
flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey
westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark
central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark
mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey
lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren
thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the
descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Source Citation:
Levin, Harry. "Criticism by Harry Levin." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center -
Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007
Additional Material
Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume(s) 8:213; 18:149; 28:143, 145; 52:142;
Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 1:147-52, 158, 162, 165, 180-81; 35:172; 42:73-135; 92:64, 68, 110, 112, 116
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, volume(s) 170:225



Student Notes: A Rose for Emily



Old Boys, Mostly American: William Faulkner, The Short Stories

"Old Boys, Mostly American: William Faulkner, The Short Stories," in his Contemporaries, Little, Brown and Company,
1962, pp. 154-58.
[A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for such essay collections as On Native Grounds (1942),
Contemporaries (1962), and An American Procession (1984). In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in
1961, Kazin discusses Faulkner's short story career and comments on several works included in the author's Collected
Stories. ]
Faulkner's short stories are not of the kind that has made the New Yorker famous; they are not even the stories of a
writer who often writes stories; many of them are not really "short stories" as that peculiarly contemporary branch of
literature has been invented, patented, and mechanically imitated in the United Statestight, deft, wholly dramatic and
polished fables of social life that present symbols rather than characters whose uniqueness is the prime concern of the
writer, in fact, that several of these stories [in Collected Stories]and by no means the best!were written for the slicks:
something that could never be done by the kind of short story writer who specializes in the art of the miniature, and for
whom each short work has to be perfect.
Faulkner has often turned to the short story in order to relax. There is a hammy and grandiloquent side to his
imaginationas well as to his rhetorica kind of sodden and mischievous looseness of manner that easily spills into his
stories. It reminds me of W. C. Fields presiding over a banquet. One side of Faulkner's literary manner is that of the
temperamental impresario presiding over his created worlda manner that recalls his gigantic confidence of Dickens
and Balzac working away at their great blocks of marble. The fact that there is no other American novelist today who
suggests such impressions to the reader is an instance of the power and breadth of Faulkner's imaginative world.
Faulkner has an abiding sense that the whole human race can be fitted into his own native spot of Mississippi earth, no
longer "than a postage stamp." The characters in these stories range from Indians on the old Mississippi frontier, who
had their Negro slaves, down to Midwesterners who have been transplanted from their frontier into houses, in Southern
California, backed "into a barren foothill combed and curried into a cypress-and-marble cemetery dramatic as a stage set
and topped by an electric sign in red in red bulbs, in the San Fernando valley fog, glared in broad sorceless ruby as
though just beyond the crest lay not heaven but hell."
As such fiercely inimical phrases suggest, Faulkner pays out steady moral judgment on all that has unfolded in his comedie
humaine of American life. Moving from the Indian swamps to Hollywood (past the South before and after the war, the
clash of the poor Sartorises, the young aviators in the Royal Flying Corps, traveling air circuses in the 1920s), the reader
has a constant sense, in Faulkner"s work, not "America" but a world history on this soil, from the time when "New
Orleans was a European city." A whole procession of races, clans, tribes, and classes moves through these stories, and
you sense that you are reading not from story to story, from "gem" to "gem," as they say of collections by Katherine
Anne Porter or J. D. Salinger or Hemingway (these are really virtuosi of the short story and perhaps exclusively of the
story), but from anecdote to anecdote fallen from the novels that are themselves recurrent stories of what has happened
on this "postage stamp" of land in Mississippi,
Of course there are stories in [Collected Stories] like "A Rose for Emily," that are famous anthology piecesstories that
show all too clearly how airily Faulkner can reproduce the manipulation of the reader's emotions that is the real aim of
the commercial short story. "A Rose for Emily" is the story of the old maid who fell in love with a Northerner but
resisted being jilted once too often, only after her death, when the curious townspeople were able to enter her house at
last, did they discover that she had kept her dead lover in the bed where she had killed him after their last embrace. But
even in "A Rose for Emily," the intended Gothic touch of horror counts less with Faulkner than the human drama of
the Southern gentlewoman unable to understand how much the world has changed around her. And in a far greater
story, "That Evening Sun," in which the characters are the Compson children from Faulkner's great novel, The Sound and
the Fury, the emotion of the Negro servant, Nancy, who is pregnant by another man and lives in terror of being killed by


her husband, is built up with such skill and communicates so well the bewilderment and anxiety of the children
themselves (Quentin, the oldest, is the narrator) that the terror of the woman becomes the atmospheric center of the
story, communicating itself to the children as the first absolute fact they must learn to recognize.
"That Evening Sun" begins with a description of "old" Jefferson in the days when Negro laundresses still walked about
carrying baskets of wash on their heads, and were able to stoop under fences without dropping their load. And the use
of this opening comes back to us when Quentin describes Nancy telling a story to him and the children"...like she was
living somewhere else, waiting somewhere else. She was outside the cabin. Her voice was inside and the shape of her, the
Nancy that could stoop under a barbed wire fence with a bundle of clothes balanced on her head as though without
weight, like a balloon, was there."
The concern with emotion as a fact in itself, virtually an absolute, that stands apart from history and survives itthis is
nowhere more pronounced than in "Red Leaves," probably the high point of this collection. An Indian chief has died,
and his Negro slave, knowing that by custom the dog, the horse, and the body servant of a chief must be buried with
him, runs off to the swamp. Faulkner indulges in a certain amount of mischievous humor, Southern white man's humor,
at the expense of Negro slaves. With his marvelous sense of costume, he describes an old Indian, barefoot, in a long
linen frock coat and a beaver hat, busily complaining that "This world is going to the dogs. It is being ruined by white
men. We got along fine for years and years, before the white men foisted their Negroes upon us. In the old days the old
men sat in the shade and ate stewed deer's flesh and corn and smoked tobacco and talked of honor and grave affairs;
now what are we to do? Even the old wear themselves into the grave taking care of them that like sweating." And the
torpid, tubby Indians go after the runaway with a kind of sadnessthey are vaguely sorry for him, but sorrier that he
cannot understand and accept fully the ritual that obliges him to be buried with his master, thus putting Indians to
exertions that are undignified and useless. These Indians are philosophical-minded, yet they are so detached in their
fatalism (the world moves as it must and men must die) that they can insist on their ritual without, as it were, having to
respect it. The Negro slave, by contrast, is portrayed as misunderstanding his proper function as a man; he seems to find
satisfaction in the exertion of flight itself (as does Joe Christmas in Light in August). When he gets panicky, he identifies
himself with the animals in the woods, and all in all is shown operating on a level that causes the Indians to shake their
heads. Yet as his great novel, Light in August, Faulkner rises above these reflections on the race his own class so long held
in servitude; the story ends on a concentrated image of the slave, begging for water before his end and unable to swallow
it. On capturing the slave, who had nowhere to run but back home again, this Indian had said, "Come. You ran well. Do
not be ashamed." Now he simply says, in a final, not unkindly order"Come." It is a marvelous story, and not the least
for the sense of fatality in human affairs that unites the Negro and Indian at last this sense of what must be is always the
deepest element in Faulkner's imaginative sense of things.
Perhaps it is this quality that interests me in a story, "Beyond," that is admittedly slight and even a bit forced in emotion.
But Faulkner, portraying a dead father who in a brief interlude of consciousness after death has been searching for his
son, who died at ten, has the man say,"...anyway, there is a certain integral consistency which, whether it be right or
wrong, a man must cherish because it alone will ever permit him to die." At times, as in the story "The Tall Men," this
classical understanding in Faulkner, his insistence on the supremacy of character over everything, tends to get
propagandized. In this story an old Southern law officer says to a stranger: "Yes, sir. A man gets around and he sees a
heap; a heap of folks in a heap of situations. The trouble is, we done got into the habit of confusing the situations with
folks." And Faulkner practically smirks as the old fellow says it. Still, the fact remains: it is "folks," not "situations," that
make up the real life of fiction. "Situations" make short stories, but "folks" make life. Faulkner is interested in "folks."
No wonder that his interest sometimes gets too big for the mold to which stories are fitted.

Source Citation:
Kazin, Alfred. "Old Boys, Mostly American: William Faulkner, The Short Stories." DISCovering Authors. Online ed.
Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007


A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
For Teachers
"A Rose for Emily" integrates the elements of gothic literature with the locale of a small southern
town and its attitudes and values. Students will likely be easily engaged with the elements of suspense
and the unraveling of a plot that includes murder and romance. However, the story's elegance and
meaning are in Faulkner's masterful use of detail and his analysis of southern society. Like many of
Faulkner's works, "A Rose for Emily" deals with change and resistance to change in the South. The
irony of this geographic and cultural region is that it sought to change the United States and waged a
civil war in order to secede from a nation that it felt was forcing it to change its ways. Thai war
inaugurated profound changes that continue to evolve throughout the region. Southerners unleashed
change by defying it. In the same vein, southerners have traditionally resisted change in their own
local societies. So once Colonel Sartoris tells the young Miss Emily that she is exempt from paying
taxes, that decision, in her mind, is final. Any hint of a promise of marriage would also be
considered final by this lady. Although the story traces the life of Emily Grierson from her twenties
until her death as an old woman, the real focus is on her family's and neighbors' perceptions and
their individual and collective judgments of Miss Emily during her periods of isolation, rejection,
and her brief romantic interlude with Homer Barron. The voyeuristic presence of the townspeople is
evident throughout the story as they carefully observe and comment on Miss Emily's every action.
As a member of an old southern aristocratic family, Miss Emily has become an icon, or a relic of the
past. The townspeople find her eccentric, and tradition demands that they defer to her. Neither the
aldermen, nor the druggist, nor the Judge opposes her, and Miss Emily is allowed to resist the rules
of society to which others must adhere. Miss Emily is constrained by and devoted to the "old"
southern mores and traditions by which the aristocracy enjoys a privileged position by virtue of its
wealth and lineage. As modernity begins to encroach on her world, she desperately tries to suspend
time and attempts to create a static world where, as Dylan Thomas puts it, "death shall have no
dominion." She refuses to acknowledge either her father's or Colonel Sartoris's death, which
foreshadows her later blurred distinction between life and death. Unable to adapt, she clings
tenaciously to a decadent past. The ways of the Old South are doomed, as is she, and she embraces
death, metaphorically and, at the end of the story, literally.
Students might he asked to list their perceptions of the South and consider why these perceptions
exist, and how these perceptions differ from their notions of the West, Midwest, or New England. It
would be valuable to have students take notes while reading the story on both the explicit and
implicit references to southern attitudes and behaviors.
Another intriguing aspect of the story is that the events are not presented in chronological order
Students might want to try their hands as sleuths and plot the sequence of events in an attempt to
answer the following questions: When did Miss Emily buy the silver wedding toiletries?
When did she purchase the rat poison? When did she murder Homer? Did she murder Homer? To
what extent is the Negro servant complicit? Was Miss Emily guilty of premeditated murder or was
she mentally ill? If given a trial, what would the townspeople of Jefferson want to happen to Miss
Emily?
Students who read "A Rose for Emily" should be made aware of the school of southern writers
such as Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston,


Eudora Welty, and Thomas Wolfeand their places in the literary canon. Students should also learn
the elements of southern gothic literature and identify how "A Rose for Emily" either conforms to
or deviates from this genre.
Although "A Rose for Emily" is a comparatively short story, it successfully encompasses a series of
themes, some of which include family, community, race, gender, isolation, conformity, madness,
secrecy, control, expectations, the past, wealth and privilege, decorum, and tradition. Students will
likely find the story pleasurable, important, and memorable.
CONNECTI ONS INSI DE AND OUTSI DE
THE BEDFORD I NTRODUCTI ON TO LI TERATURE
Inside Connections
"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," by Stephen Crane (text p. 308)
"The Soul selects her own Society" by Emily Dickinson (text p. 1089) "Battle
Royal," by Ralph Ellison (text p. 285)
"Barn Burning," by William Faulkner (text p. 499)
"How to Tell a True War Story," by Tim O'Brien (text p. 617)
Outside Connections
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," by Ambrose Bierce
This story is likely one of the most successful American tales of variable realities and mysterious
timelinesuntil the end.
"Washington Square," by Henry James
This is only one of James's stories of thwarted expectations perpetrated by an outsider. For a
gothic story with a memorable character closer to Faulkner's Miss Emily, readers might wish to
visit Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.
"The Tell-Tale Heart," by Edgar Allan Poe
Faulkner reported that he had Poe in mind while writing "A Rose for Emily." This story of the home
murder that would never be silenced


For Students
WORDS TO KNOW
cupolas: domed roofs or ceilings; small structures surmounting roofs august:
respected for reasons of age or rank
perpetuity: the state or condition of being continual or enduring
deputation: a delegation; a person or group commissioned to represent another or others motes: very
small particles; traces; specks
temerity: careless or foolish disregard of danger
diffident: timid or reluctant to assert oneself
deprecation: an expression of disapproval or condemnation tableau: a
scene; a vivid representation
spraddled: straddled
virulent: bitterly hostile; hateful; baneful
sibilant: distinguished by, or producing, a hissing sound

1 Miss Emily's character, in part, is established by the actions and attitudes of the towns-people.
What does the reader assume about Miss Emily based on her neighbors' comments and
impressions?
2. "A Rose for Emily" is a story deeply evocative of southern traditions, attitudes, and behaviors. In
what ways does the story capture the southern way of life and its changing attitudes as it follows
Miss Emily from her early life into her later years?
3. The first sentence in the story makes a sharp distinction between the actions and motives of the
men and the women in Jefferson. How do gender roles and expectations continue to be delineated
throughout the story?
4. The author avoids a chronological sequence and heightens suspense by telling the events out of
order. How does this method contribute to the mystery of the story?
5. How is Homer Barron different from the men in Jefferson, and what aspects of his personality
might attract Miss Emily to him?
6. Who is the "Negro," and what does his presence in the story represent?
7. What events in the story indicate that Miss Emily seems unwilling to accept change? Are there any
events that suggest she is receptive to a life unbound by "old" southern traditions?
8. What explanation might there be for Homer's departure from Jefferson and his return shortly
after Miss Emily's cousins depart?
9. The conventional plot structure of detective stories provides clues that foreshadow an impending
catastrophe. What clues are given that suggest Homer's impending murder? What events might have
precipitated Miss Emily's decision to murder Homer?
10. Homer's death may not surprise most readers. However, what is the final shocking discovery?
Why does it suggest more than that a murder has occurred?


1. Faulkner uses many of the conventions of gothic literature and creates an atmosphere that is both
mysterious and foreboding. How does Faulkner's use of diction, imagery, and rich sensory detail
heighten the atmosphere of suspense?
2. Faulkner's narrator not only speaks for himself but also represents the larger community. In
addition, this point of view paradoxically provides both an objective and a subjective view of the
events surrounding Miss Emily's life. How does this ambiguous narrator influence the reader's
understanding of the story?
1. "Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain" is an example of
a. metaphor.
b. irony
c. hyperbole.
d. parody
e. personification.

2. "Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windowsshe had evidently shut up
the top floor of the houselike the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us,
we could never tell which." The point of the simile is to illustrate
a. adventurous stirrings.
b. ocular problems.
c. reclusive detachment.
d. romantic escapism.
e. artistic appreciation.

3. In "Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care," the word tradition can best be
defined as
a. welcomed inheritance.
b. proud heritage.
c. beloved institution.
d. established custom.
e. ancient legend.

4. "It smelled of dust and disusea close, dank smell." The author's description is intended to
a. suggest slovenliness.
b. symbolize a decadent South.
c. criticize the competence of the Negro caretaker.
d. find fault with southern decor.
e. comment on the infrequency of visitors.

5. "She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water...." The rhetorical purpose
of this description is to compare Miss Emily with
a. a large aquatic creature.
b. a dead body submerged in formaldehyde.
c. an obese corpse.


d. a decomposing fish.
e. a drowning victim.

6. "It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if
it [emphasis ours] had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness." In this
sentence, the antecedent of "it" is
a. recognition.
b. last Grierson.
c. dignity
d. demanded.
e. imperviousness.

7. Miss Emily's conformity to southern tradition is evident in all of the following EXCEPT
a. China painting.
b. her unwillingness to defy her father.
c. her commitment to noblesse oblige.
d. her refusal to allow a metal number to be fastened to her door.
e. her wheeled buggy rides with Homer Barron.

8. The narrator's attitude toward Miss Emily could best be described as
a. critical and condemnatory.
b. judgmental and detached.
c. resentful and disappointed.
d. supportive and sympathetic.
e. bewildered and astonished.

9. Colonel Sartoris's decision to remit Miss Emily's taxes in perpetuity and his edict to require all
Negro women to wear an apron in public reveal his
a. generosity and benevolence.
b. respect for all women's roles in the community.
c. appreciation for domestic and economic affairs.
d. immense political power in Jefferson.
e. embodiment of southern aristocratic attitudes.

10. The Negro manservant allows the ladies to enter Miss Emily's house, then walks "right through
the house and out the back and was not seen again" because
a. he is afraid they will accuse him of stealing.
b. he has stolen something following Miss Emily's death.
c. he can no longer serve Miss Emily.
d. he does not wish to betray her by confessing any of her secrets.
e. a and b
f. c and d

SIMULATED AP ESSAY QUESTIONS


1 Many literary texts describe characters whose actions and choices are directly influenced by their
immediate community. Identify and analyze the effect of community on Miss Emily and the other
members of Jefferson.
2. Central to the interpretation of a literary work is the ability to understand the role of the narrator.
In "A Rose for Emily," does the narrator assume a consistent stance or does he express differing
perspectives? What does the narrator contribute and how does he function in the story?
1. How does the narrator characterize the townspeople of Jefferson? Write an essay describing their
influence or complicity in Miss Emily's actions.
2. "A Rose for Emily" compares traditional southern values and current attitudes. What do these
comparisons reveal about human behavior and the constraints of society?


Gender and Authorial Limitation in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"
(Special Issue: William Faulkner)
Faulkner's extensive authorial power in "A Rose for Emily" looms evident in the design of a large Southern gothic
house, in the outline of three complex generations of a Southern community, and in the development of a plot that
dutifully weaves and unweaves a mystery through a limited omniscient point of view. However, Faulkner also reveals
and revels in an authorial lack of knowledge when presented with writing a "lady" into a patriarchal Southern text.
Although sole author of "A Rose for Emily," this writer knows little about what went on in his lady's, Miss Emily
Grierson's, household. Knowledge of Emily proves unavailable to him (and consequently to the reader) for about thirty
years before we meet her -- before her father dies and lets her out of the house -- and also for the last twenty-seven years
of her life. He writes, "her front door remained closed,"(1) and with these words, he both instigates and reveals an
extended period of limited knowledge.
William Faulkner opens "A Rose for Emily" with a lengthy fifty-six-word single sentence that both encapsulates a
community's reaction to death and displays an immediate authorial compulsion to describe a scene through gender
differences. This author situates his story in a line-up of men and women conjoined in the desire to attend Miss Emily's
funeral but divided in the motivation assigned by the author:
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful
affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no
one save an old manservant -- a combined gardener and cook -- had seen in at least ten years. (p. 119)
Gender motivation splits between respect and curiosity, affection for a representation and intention to view the insides
of a house. The subordinate object of the sentence is "Miss Emily," the woman who provides the reason to feel
"affection" and to "see," and "our whole town" hovers as subject of the sentence. The stylistics of Faulkner's language
thus serves to subordinate Emily, ostensibly the subject of the tale, and to elevate the town as the truer subject.
Reading Emily as subordinate subject matter to the town renders peripheral much criticism regarding the story, for most
of the scholarship addresses the motives for Emily's actions toward Homer Barron. These motives range from sexual
repression and Oedipal issues to provision of symbols designating the passing of the Old South to the new.(2) While
scholars have treated the story as a murder mystery and have struggled with the revelation of Emily's "secret," a more
pervasive secret reigns over the story: why does Faulkner create a narrator with indefinable gender to tell this particular
story?
Until recently the narrator has been relegated to a marginal place of importance in the tale. Hal Blythe's 1988 essay offers
provocative discussion of the narrator; however, Blythe assumes the narrator to be male.(3) Michael Burduck's 1990
essay critiques Blythe's article on exactly this count and argues for a female narrator.(4) Both of these approaches
preserve the binary positions that words such as "male" and "female" signify in language. Because Faulkner has left the
gender of the narrator undetermined in the text, it seems that postmodern critics assume he meant one or the other and
that part of the conundrum of the tale is to solve the gender of the narrator. The often unspoken concern underlying the
quest for gender resolution in this tale is Faulkner's "feminism."
The question of the canonized male writer's relationship to feminism proves vastly complicated. Laura Claridge and
Elizabeth Langland, in their 1990 groundbreaking work, Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, point
out the complex layers of this difficult question:
. . . to write against patriarchy as a male fettered by it does not necessarily result in writing for liberation of
gender bondage, a primary aim of philosophical and practical feminism. `Feminist' tends to imply a political
agenda -- the granting of full economic, political, and social equality to women. It implies as well a commitment
to a woman's autonomy and a recognition of her individual and independent importance. Although many male
writers are interested in a space or possibility for expression coded as `feminine,' they are not necessarily


interested in particular women and their plights -- or even the general plight of the generic `woman.' A male
writer may simply need the space of what he or his culture terms the feminine in which to express himself
more fully because he experiences the patriarchal construction of his masculinity as a construction. He may,
that is, appropriate the feminine to enlarge himself, a process not incompatible with contempt for actual
women.(5)
From "our whole town" emerges the narrator of the story who poses an interesting limited omniscient narrating position
for Faulkner to control. The author designates this narrator both as part of the "our whole town" and part of the
supposed objectivity through whom the reader must envision the story.
Faulkner designs this narrative position as a reflection of his own stance toward patriarchal societal structures and
toward classic realist fiction. He stands firmly within the constructs, yet by calling attention to this vantage point and its
inadequacies, by deploying a bisexual narration into the text, and by presenting Emily's house both as intimate space for
the character as well as impregnable barrier to its own author/creator, Faulkner dismantles the structure of classic realist
fiction. Both narrator and author participate in and attempt to render beyond the powerful systems that construct them.
Faulkner's narrator suggests an authorial bisexuality through use of a disengendered pronoun; the gender of the narrator
remains unclear throughout the story. We do not know immediately whether this narrator feels affection toward or turns
a curious eye on Miss Emily and the funeral events, and these options provide the engendered distinctions suggested by
Faulkner at the beginning of the tale. More importantly, we do not know whether he or she proves capable of both
motivations while participating in the passing away of Emily Grierson and in ascertaining fragments of her past.
Minrose C. Gwin suggests Faulkner's capabilities of exacerbating male and female elements in the self and in writing as a
bisexual connection to his female subjects and to their power as disruptive agents in a text.(6) The bisexual possibilities
housed in the narrator of "A Rose for Emily" reflect just such capabilities in Faulkner and attest to his attempts to
interrogate the gender control inherent in authorship. In choosing to disengender the narrator pronoun, Faulkner offers
what Catherine Belsey refers to as an "implicit critique" about the "nature of fiction" itself.(7) "A Rose for Emily" asserts
that gender often controls the eye of a story, but it does not necessarily control the behavior of a character when he or
she remains out of sight.
By not outwardly claiming an engendered visionary stance for his or her embodiment, the narrator also creates a bisexual
oscillation in language. This particular narrator creates the "permanent state of tension" defined by bisexual writing: "it is
generated and regenerated by an interaction between the feminine and masculine, between self and other" (Gwin, p. 10).
In such writing, the woman character must "traverse the spaces between presence and absence, between her own
subjectivity and her bounded status in male discourse" (p. 14), and Emily does just that. She abides Faulkner's attempts
to write her life and the narrator's attempts to speak her life; she lives her life in the white space of the page. While
Faulkner busily writes and the narrator dutifully tells, Emily craftily arranges -- remember that she has an artistic flair
exhibited in her china-painting lessons -- skeletal bone and one single hair into an image to display at the end of the
story.
Although the reader witnesses Faulkner's words on the page and the scenes described by the narrator, he or she
witnesses nothing of the process of Emily's art. Emily thus remains present and absent simultaneously -- present when
Faulkner's words and the narrator's scenarios capture her, absent when the words cannot penetrate beyond the door
leading to her actions. Miss Grierson ultimately proves unrepresentable: a memory, an image, a nightmare, an inhabitant
of intimate space alone, a mind piece, a hyperbolic omission. And Faulkner ultimately asserts his powerlessness to
represent her.
The narrator does suggest that the community women at least understand the viability of secrets as regards Miss Emily
and her house. These women encourage the men to act upon their suspicions. The first concerns the smell that ensues
"after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart -- the one we believed would marry her -- had deserted
her." One of the neighbors (and Faulkner makes a specific point of its being a female neighbor) makes an issue of the
smell to the judge:


A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old. "But what will you have me
do about it madam?" he said. "Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law?" "I'm sure
that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the
yard. I'll speak to him about it." The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in
diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother
Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met -- three greybeards and
one younger man, a member of the rising generation. "It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her
place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't . . ." "Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said,
"will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" (p. 122)
At least three interesting issues arise from this passage. The judge only feels it necessary to act after a man complains,
but the fact remains that a woman initiated the idea of the smell. Both the man and the woman think that a "word"
would amend the situation. Inside the text, then, rests the thought that a word exists to facilitate a change regarding Miss
Emily's house; the men state it and the women state it. What this word might be goes unsaid, however. And finally, the
issue of the smell itself exudes from the house, from an intimate dwelling, and threatens to permeate the text. Faulkner
tries to penetrate this house with words, but he cannot find them. Instead he and Judge Stevens send men to cover over
the odor from outside the house. Neither proves ready to discover this particular intimacy.
Gaston Bachelard discusses odors and intimacy and houses. He says that only the dweller inside the house, alone, houses
the memories that belong to any particular house and are generated by any particular smell associated with the house.(8)
When the intimate goings-on inside Emily's house threaten to waft out into the neighborhood, the community wants it
covered with words, wants "a word" to stop what they reluctantly and repugnantly sense. Faulkner and the judge stop
the smell and the scene with lime, the word and the substance. Interestingly, the word "lime" has as one of its variant
meanings "to paint or cover a surface with a composition of lime and water; whitewash." Not only do these skulking
men rid the community of the smell, but they whitewash the source of the smell; they eliminate a sense. They protect
their "idol" standing in the window, and thereby collude in the night to comply with and to shield a lady and a murder
just as Faulkner colludes in protecting himself from knowing a woman like Emily by limiting her murderous activities to
those that take place behind doors he masterfully describes but refuses to penetrate.
In a pure and public patriarchy, no language exists to address the foul smell exuding from a woman's house. By
definition, a "lady" would not have such a house. To address Emily in such a way would have negated her standing as a
lady, and since destroying ladies proves undesirable in a patriarchy, only the option to collude unwittingly in her behavior
may be followed.
Faulkner's desire to get inside this house, yet his unwillingness or his inability simply to enter in while Emily lives,
establishes Emily as psycho-barrier. This woman thwarts Faulkner's ability to negotiate the intimate space he has, as
author, created to house her.
In order to demonstrate further his authorial lack, Faulkner lays bare the methods of creating classic realist fiction. As
Belsey reminds us, classic realism dominates as a literary form of the nineteenth century and arguably of the twentieth (p.
45), and it mainly entails the creation of an "enigma" who persistently calls attention to the cultural and signifying
systems, the inclusion of common plot focal points such as murder, the ongoing movement toward closure and
understanding for the reader, and reestablishment of an appropriate order within the plot.
In "A Rose for Emily," Faulkner abides by the form in that he provides Emily as enigma, Homer Barron's murder as
focal point, and the bisexual narrator to exhibit the conscious voice of the tale, but the revelation of Homer Barron's
skeleton, coupled with the gray hair at the end of the tale, affords an irregular closure and limited "knowingness" for the
reader. Although the story closes in the sense that its words cease, no mention of restoration of any order reveals itself
through the language of the tale. Faulkner stops writing, and the narrator stops narrating at the sight of the unlikely
coupling of the skeleton and the hair. The narrator sees but ceases to narrate at the sight.
The ideology that requires closure proves incapacitated by an author who forces his narrator to facilitate such a horror.
Faulkner thus dismantles the closure and the restoration of order required by classic realism. He also displays the limits


of his authority as omniscient creator. His text ends in awkward gawking; it ends in image and smell: the hair and an
acrid smell.
Faulkner subtly prepares the reader for the narrator's failure to relay what he sees in the mock-closing gesture by
gradually dismantling his or her perspective from a limited to a decidedly unwilling omniscience. The details required to
know something begin to evade the narrator as early as section Ill of the story. When Emily purchases the arsenic, the
druggist harbors a fear regarding the use to which Emily intends to put the poison. When the man asks her what she
wants it for,
Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for
eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The
Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. (p. 126)
The druggist has too much "affection" for her to "see" clearly what he saw in her eyes. He reveals the purchase to the
community members, and they collectively decide that she will commit suicide.
When Miss Emily clearly continues to live, the community refuses to invest in an alternative interpretation about the
arsenic. They simply forget it or suppress it. This druggist and the community members thus house information that our
narrator could pursue, but he or she does not. He or she remains too embedded in the construct of the community to
interrogate his neighbors, a reflection again of a Faulkner who remains too much embedded in the construct of
patriarchy to see a great distance beyond it.
In section IV of the story, the ladies coerce the Baptist minister into calling upon Miss Emily to discuss her gallivanting
in public with Homer Barron. The minister does visit her, and the narrator relates, "He would never divulge what
happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again" (p. 126). The minister knows something that the
narrator does not. A piece of information about an interaction with Emily lies trapped inside a character in the text,
never to be revealed. Our writer and our narrator do not retrieve it. Clearly, they privilege the harboring of information
over the gathering of knowledge.
In section V, the Negro manservant who lives with Miss Emily is never questioned as a source of knowledge. When
Miss Emily dies, "The Negro met the first ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and
their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not
seen again" (p. 129). He walks out of the story, most likely with crucial information, but being African-American and
thereby an insignificant part of the patriarchal design, his information remains unimportant, so the narrator lets him
leave. This narrator, even when confronted with the most exciting part of the mystery, refuses to participate on the front
lines. When the door to the bedroom housing the skeleton of Homer and the gray hair of Miss Emily is finally to be
forced open, the narrative "we" changes to the distant "they":
Already we [my italics] knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in orty
years, and which would have to be forced. They [my italics! waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground
before they opened it. (p. 129)
This narrator only wishes to be a reticent part of the discovery. He or she does not want to "know," nor to act. In this
way, Faulkner severely restricts even a limited narrative omniscience. Like the narrator, he has reservations about forcing
the door of knowledge, particularly as it regards gender and the death of a too familiar social structure.
Some of this concealment proves typical of the constraints imposed by the classic realist text:
The classic realist text is constructed on the basis of enigma. Information is initially withheld on condition of a
promise' to the reader that it will finally be revealed. The disclosure of this 'truth' brings the story to an end.


The movement of narrative is both towards disclosure--the end of the story--and towards concealment--
prolonging itself by delaying the end of the story through a series of 'reticences,' as Barthes calls them, snares
for the reader, partial answers to the questions raised, equivocations. (Belsey, pp. 55-56)
In "A Rose for Emily," however, the revelation of the skeleton and the hair discloses much more than any promise
offered or any question posed. Evidence of the murder indicts the community as accessories to the murder of Homer
Barron. This murder occurs in the white space of the text, behind the word "lady" and many other such words. No one
dares to investigate because a definition would have to be dismantled as well as an entire ideology. By refusing to
penetrate this word and to include in its meaning the possibility of committing murder, the entire community becomes
involved in a crime. Ignorance becomes criminal; not-knowing correlates with acts of collusion. This community allows
a human being to die in order to preserve themselves from the task of investigating a word, "lady," a woman, "Miss
Emily," and a world within a house.
The Emily on the page of the text proves a subversive cover for the activity occurring in the white space beneath the
eyes of the patriarchy. Emily does in fact exist while the patriarchal community is not looking. She exists inside her
house, and this house plays an intricate role in the authorial limitation presented by Faulkner. Negotiating the meaning
of images, of structures and particularly of intimate space provides the fundamental issue in this fiction. In queuing the
men and the women outside Emily's house, Faulkner demonstrates a polarity of interests that he encodes with differing
gender motivations. The men want to feel respect for a monument, a structure erected as representative of a human
being; the women want to see the inside of the house.
Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of space for the ability to "read a house," or to "read a room," "since both room
and house are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy" (p. 38). Accommodating
these terms to the Grierson house situates the grouping outside the structure as possible readers waiting for the text to
open. Faulkner thus sets up dual enigmas for the readers in the text and the readers of the text, that of Emily the
monument, and that of the house and its intimacies. In his gender division, he assigns men with concern for the enigma
and women with concern for intimacy. In his assignment of a disengendered pronoun to the narrator, the narrator
becomes a straddler perhaps interested in the monument and in the house. The men's affection renders the house
something larger than life; the women's curiosity renders the house an intimate container.
In choosing the Grierson house as that enigma about to be entered and discerned, Faulkner agrees to enter into intimate,
dynamic and revealing poetic space:
. . . the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.
The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different
dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. (Bachelard, p. 6)
Interestingly, in the first paragraph of the story, Faulkner aligns the community; in the second paragraph, he discusses
the outside of the house; and in the third paragraph, the house does exactly as Bachelard prescribes: it affords Faulkner
entrance to discussion of Emily's past. Thereby, the narrative of Emily's past intertwines with the present people aligned
to view her at her house. This supposed glance into Emily's life immediately becomes entangled with the lives of the
spectators themselves. The stories of the house will engulf and include them as they attempt to read.
Faulkner attempts in this collusive suggestion to ascertain the significance of wanting to know a secret about an other, an
Emily, but again as Bachelard points out, "All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without
ever being able to tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has total objectivity" (p. 13). Faulkner can only take the
reader on an approach toward the Grierson house, an intimate space filled with specific secrets, which affords readers
the possibility of an understanding of the patriarchal systems that awarded Emily her otherness. We think that the story,
in its classic realist fiction guise, will provide a revelation, a disclosure, but merely the evidence of at least one secret will
be revealed, the secret of the unknowables and the state of "being without" knowledge.
"Common sense" codes believed to be truths facilitate lack of knowledge. Codes about asking women questions,
assumptions about what a woman would use arsenic for, all are revealed for the fragile inabilities of each and every


person abiding patriarchal society to admit to the collusion in which they participate, to admit to the many murders of
personhood that occur beneath their noses--literally, Miss Emily's neighbors could have smelled this one--due to this
gap-filled framework:
Common sense consists of a number of social meanings and the particular ways of understanding the world
which guarantee them. These meanings, which inevitably favor the interests of particular social groups, become
fixed and widely accepted as true irrespective of sectional interests . . . . All common sense relies on a naive
view of language as transparent and true, undistorted by such things as 'ideology', a term which is reserved for
explanations representing opposed sectional interests. Common-sense knowledge is not a monolithic, fixed
body of knowledge. It is often contradictory and subject to change. It is not always necessarily conservative in
its implications. Its political effects depend on the particular context in which it is articulated. However, its
ower comes from its claim to be natural, obvious and therefore true.(9)
Faulkner writes, "[W]e had long though of [the Griersons] as a tableau" (p. 123); this collective type of thinking
represents a common sense about how to think of such a family. "So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we
were not pleased exactly, but vindicated . . . " (p. 123); the collective community even feels common emotions and
negates other emotions. "We did not say she was crazy then" (p. 124); a group will know by virtue of common sense
when craziness occurs. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing
left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will" (p. 124). The collective has a commonsense
memory and a common-sense rationale for Emily's behavior. This common-sense "we" even has access to the same set
of eyes: "When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those
angels in colored church windows -- sort of tragic and serene" (p. 124). It is common sense to see her this way;
everyone, "we," saw her this way.
The common-sense language in Faulkner designs the oppressive situation in which Emily had to live. Either a "we" or a
"they" designs language about her that contains and explains her actions. However, ultimately she acts and slips behind
this language. A common-sense language cannot write her. To write about her consistently, Faulkner would have had to
drop the common-sense language and to have entered the house during the time she lived there. To do so would have
been to penetrate the walls that protect a lady, and Faulkner does not grant himself such power. He opts for politeness
and lack of knowledge; to have proceeded otherwise would have constituted a language rape for a man invested in the
idea of a lady.
The common-sense level of the narrative language portrays a Faulkner writing Emily as a pivotal agent embodying the
end of the Old South. Such a language requires many skirtings, many unperused years, an unperused house, and many
unasked questions. Emily resists such purified symbol-making by leaving Homer Barron in the bcd with her hair, and
Faulkner resists the common-sense language by allowing the story to end in an image of words describing the body and
the hair. Ultimately Emily and Faulkner collude in dismantling the structures that bind one to a form of literature, to a
patriarchal structure, to a common-sense language.
In other words, Emily daily refuses to participate in the symbol-making of her as a precious lady of the Old South, an
idol, and icon. Although she has almost thirty years to bury Homer Barron in the ground, she simply does not. She keeps
him in the bcd and either sleeps with him throughout these years, or she artfully leaves the hair and crafts a pillow
indentation to signify the possibility that she could have done so behind the backs of the community and behind the
discourse that symbolized her. She becomes hyperbolic omission.
By admitting to not-knowing Emily, by leaving her to act beyond the language of the story, Faulkner subverts his own
discourse and displays the discourse for its constraining devices. Faulkner draws attention to the construct of gender as a
posture that infiltrates literature, affects and burdens its language, and adds non-negotiable layers to the ability to tell
stories. "As individuals we are not the mere objects of language but the sites of discursive struggle, a struggle which takes
place in the consciousness of the individual" (Weedon, p. 106). The unrepresentable Miss Emily acts as site for the
struggle to exist between the descriptive terms "idol" and "idle"--Miss Emily was neither--and William Faulkner designs
himself as disempowered authorial site struggling for a language that delivers anything like a lady to literary discourse.


(9) Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 77. (1) William
Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily," Collected Stories (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 128. (2) Dennis W. Allen, "Horror and
Perverse Delight: Faulkner's À Rose for Emily'," Modern Fiction Studies, 30 (Winter 1984), 688. (3) Hal Blythe, "The
Chivalric Narrator of À Rose for Emily'," University of Mississippi Studies in English, 6 (1988), 280-284. (4) Michael
Burduck, "Another View of Faulkner's Narrator in À Rose for Emily'." University of Mississippi Studies in English, 8
(1990), 209-211. (5) Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 3-4. (6) Minrose C. Gwin, 7he Feminine and Faulkner: Reading
(Beyond) Sexual Difference (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 10- 12. (7) Catherine Belsey,
"Constructing the Subject: deconstructing the text," in Feminist Criticism and Social Change, ed. Judith Newton and
Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 63. (8) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p.13.

Publisher Mississippi State University
Publication The Mississippi Quarterly

Subject Literature/writing
Format Magazine/Journal
ISSN 0026-637X
Issues per Year 4
Volume v47
Issue n3
Published 1994-06-22

Role Type Name
Author n/a Renee R. Curry

Person Criticism and interpretation William Faulkner



Student Notes: The Swimmer



THE SWIMMER (1968)

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES: Self-deception, meaning of life

CHARACTERS: Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster), Julie (former baby sitter), Kevin (young boy), Shirley (Neds former
mistress)

OTHER FILMS BY DIRECTOR FRANK PERRY: Last Summer (1969), Mommie Dearest (1981), Compromising
Positions (1985)

SYNOPSIS: The Swimmer is based on a short story by American writer John Cheever. Wealthy suburbanite Ned
Merrill loses everything and, by blocking out the last two or so years of years of his life, he deceives himself that he
hasnt lost anything. His deception is revealed as he confronts former friends while swimming from one pool to another
on his way to his old home. Some of his former acquaintances humor him, and genuinely try to help him. As he
proceeds, though, he runs into people who he mistreated in the past, and now speak hostilely to him. He finally arrives
at his old home, which is locked and empty.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Ned is a complex character and exhibits both good and bad qualities. On the good side, hes handsome, articulate,
upbeat and charismatic. On the bad side he is a womanizer, drank too much, spoiled his children, and is largely
insensitive to the feelings of others. On balance, do we as viewers like him enough to sympathize with is situation, and, if
so, why?

2. Neds life had collapsed as he lost his job, money, wife, home, children, mistress and friends. Is there some specific
flaw in his character that ties together all of these losses?

3. The movie opens with Ned walking through the woods, wearing only his swimsuit, with no explanation of where he is
coming from. How might this symbolize something about Ned himself?

4. Ned tries to lure people into his self-deceived world. For example, he invites people back to his home, signs up for a
$1,000 charity event, and invites women to join him on his journey. Why does he do this?

5. Some characters knew the truth about Ned, such as the couple in the opening scene, his former mistress, and the
couple in the closing scene at the public pool. How did they deal with this knowledge of Neds past?

6. At one point in his journey, Ned meets a young boy named Kevin, who in many ways is isolated as Ned. What are the
parallels and dis-parallels between Ned and Kevin?

7. Ned tries to teach Kevin to swim in an empty pool. Kevin initially objects since it wouldnt be real swimming. Ned
responds, If you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you. Kevin then complies. To
what extent do Ned and Kevin think that they are really swimming?

8. In one scene at the public swimming pool, Ned is forced to take a shower beforehand, and then tries to maneuver
through the overcrowded pool. What does this say about Neds place in the world?

9. In the original 1968 trailer to the movie, the narrator asks the question When you talk about The Swimmer, will you
talk about yourself? Thankfully, Neds level of self-deception is not possible for typical people. In what more narrow
areas of our lives, though, might our self-deception be as strong as Neds (e.g., romantic prowess, religious belief)?

10. Relativism is the view that people and/or societies create their own truths. How is The Swimmer an attack on
relativism?


11. A variant of relativism is postmodernism the view that we should reject traditionally rigid views of truth and
meaning. In many ways Ned is a postmodern man. The success of his postmodernism, though, depends on his ability to
live in his world of self-deception. Is it possible to embrace postmodernism without engaging in self-deception like
Neds?


The Swimmer
By John Cheever
Adapted from: SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on The Swimmer. SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 4 Feb. 2011.
Context
Born in 1912 in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Cheever grew up with only his mother and older brother, Fred, after his
bankrupted father abandoned the family. At seventeen, he was expelled from high school for smoking. He wrote a short
story called Expelled about the experience, which he sold to the New Republic, then moved to Boston, where he lived
with his brother and wrote. Eventually he moved to New York City, where he lived on next to nothing while he worked
on his stories. He published a short story in the New Yorker when he was twenty-three, the first of his 121 appearances in
the magazine. In 1938, Cheever joined the army and fought in World War II, but he continued writing and publishing
stories. He published his first collection, The Way Some People Live, in 1943.
Plot Overview
On a Sunday afternoon in midsummer, Neddy and Lucinda Merrill and Helen and Donald Westerhazy sit around the
Westerhazys pool, complaining about their hangovers. They are all drinking. Neddy feels young, energetic, and happy.
He decides to get home by swimming across all the pools in his county. He feels like an explorer. He dives into the
Westerhazys pool, swims across, and gets out on the other side. He thinks about all the pools that lie ahead and the
friends that await him.
He walks to the Grahams pool, swims across, then has a drink. He next swims across the Hammers pool, then several
others. At the Bunkers pool, a party is going on. Enid Bunker greets him, telling him that shes happy he could come to
the party after all. He has a drink, then moves on. The Levys arent home, but Neddy swims across their pool anyway
and helps himself to a drink, feeling very contented. A storm begins, and Neddy waits it out in the Levys gazebo. After
the storm, he notices that red and yellow leaves are scattered all over the lawn.
Neddy heads toward the Welchers pool. On his way, he finds that the Lindleys horse-riding area is overgrown, and he
cant remember whether he heard that the Lindleys were going away for the summer. At the Welchers house, he finds
that the pool is empty, which Neddy thinks is strange. There is a for-sale sign in front of their house. Neddy tries to
remember when he last heard from the Welchers. He wonders whether his memory is failing him or he has just
repressed unpleasant information.
Neddy waits for a long time to cross a highway, and people in the cars going by yell and throw things at him. He knows
that he should head back to the Westerhazys, but he cant bring himself to do so. He finally manages to cross to the
median and then to the other side. He walks to a public pool, showers, and swims across, disgusted by the crowds and
the overly chlorinated water. Then he walks to the Hallorans. He takes off his swim trunks because he knows the
Hallorans enjoy being naked and swims across the pool. The Hallorans greet him and say that theyre sorry for all his
misfortunes, hinting that hes sold his house and something has happened to his family. Neddy denies that anything


has happened, puts his swim trunks back on, and leaves. He feels cold and weak and smells burning wood. He wishes he
could have a drink of whiskey so that he could warm up and get some energy.
Neddy asks for a drink when he gets to Helen and Eric Sachses pool, but Helen says they havent been drinking since
Eric had an operation three years ago. Neddy has no recollection that Eric had been sick. He swims across their pool,
then tells them he hopes to see them again soon.
He goes to the Biswangers house. The Biswangers regularly invite him and Lucinda to dinner, but they always refuse
because the Biswangers are of a lower social standing. A party is going on, and Neddy goes to the bar. Grace Biswanger
greets him coldly, and the bartender is rude to him. Neddy knows that their odd behavior means something has
happened to his own social standing because caterers and bartenders always know whats happening in his social circle.
In the background, Grace says something about someone losing all their money and asking her for a loan. Neddy swims
across the pool, then leaves.
He expects to get a warm welcome at Shirley Adamss pool because Shirley had been his mistress, although he cant
remember how long ago the affair had ended. Shirley tells him she wont give him any more money and that she wont
give him a drink because someone is in the house. Neddy swims across the pool, but he has trouble getting out and must
use the ladder. As he walks away, he smells fall flowers and sees fall constellations in the sky.
Neddy starts crying for the first time since childhood, feeling cold and confused. He thinks that he has just been
swimming too long and needs a drink and dry clothes. He swims weakly across a few more pools. Finally, he reaches his
own house. The lights are all off, and Neddy doesnt know where everyone could be. Every door is locked, and no one
answers when he knocks. He looks in the windows and sees that his house is empty.
Character List
Neddy Merrill - The protagonist, who decides to go home from his friends house by swimming through all the pools
in his neighborhood. Neddy and his wife, Lucinda, enjoy a high social standing in their affluent neighborhood. As he
swims home, he loses his strength, and his friends begin saying things that suggest that a great deal of time has gone by.
When he arrives home, he finds his house empty.
Analysis of Major Characters
Neddy Merrill
Neddy Merrill, with his perfect family, high social standing, and pricey suburban home, has few problems in his life and
seems to see himself and all his friends as blessed. Neddy has mastered all the rules of the world he inhabits. He accepts
and rejects invitations according to a rigid social hierarchy and engages in all the expected trappings and activities: tennis,
drinking gin, and sailing. He has many friends, and his position in this privileged world allows him to hop from pool to
pool uninvited, confident that he will be welcomed wherever he goes. If there is any unpleasantness in Neddys world,
Neddy opts not to see it. Although he is no longer young, he prides himself on his youthful strength and vigor and
seems to see himself as invincible. He exists in a state of bliss that leaves no room for anything but health and happiness.


As Neddy undertakes his watery journey home, he begins to understand that the discontent hes always stubbornly
ignored is more present in his life than he realized. Neddy has made a habit of rejecting invitations, and as friend after
friend remarks on how long its been since theyve seen him, it becomes clear that he has distanced himself from those
around him: he hadnt been aware of his friends illness, friends have moved away, and he himself has suffered from
some unknown misfortune that has cost him his wealth and family. The robust health and strength that Neddy enjoys
leaves him, and he gets weaker as his journey progresses. Rather than being eternally youthful, Neddy is actually aging
and moving toward death. Everything he once considered his righthis family, mistresss affection, youth, and social
standinghave disappeared, and at the end of the story he is left entirely alone. Neddy is not an evil man in any way, but
his willful ignorance of the unpleasant side of life eventually leads to his downfall.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
The Inevitable Passage of Time
Neddys journey home through the pools of his neighborhood turns into a journey through many years of his life,
showing that the passage of time is inevitable, no matter how much one might ignore it. Neddy has mastered the art of
denial. At the beginning of the story, the narrator tells us that Neddy is far from young, but he does his best to act
young by sliding down a banister and diving headlong into a pool. The long afternoon at the Westerhazys pool seems
timeless, no different, we can assume, from many other afternoons spent exactly the same way. Neddys idea to swim
home seems like just one more idea in a series of ideas that have popped up on many similar occasions.
As Neddys journey progresses, we see that time is actually passing much more quickly than Neddy realizes. Leaves and
hedges turn yellow and red, the constellations in the sky change, and the air gets colder. Friends are not at home when
he expects them to be, he faces scorn from the people hed once scorned, his mistress wants nothing to do with him,
and he learns that a friend has been very ill. All of these changes have happened without Neddys knowledge. Neddy
questions his memory, but he also wonders whether he has simply denied reality to a dangerous degree. His peers have
acted their age and faced adult problems, whereas he has resisted. His former mistress even asks him, Will you ever
grow up? Only at the end of the story when Neddy faces his dark, empty house does he realize that time has passed. He
has tried to ignore it, but its passage has proven to be inevitable.
The Emptiness of Suburbia
As Neddy makes his journey across the county, we see that emptiness and despair lie beneath the sunny faade of
suburbia. Although Neddy seems to have a full, happy life, he nevertheless remains isolated from others. He makes a
habit of rejecting invitations and has been out of touch with many people whom he considers friends. Neddy cant even
seem to remember personal details about many of them, such as when Mrs. Levy bought her Japanese lanterns. He
knows the rules of the social world he occupies, but this is a world built primarily on appearances. Along his path, he
encounters the comfortable trappings of high society, but no genuine friends. And everywhere he goes, people are
drinking heavily, which suggests that there is something from which they are trying to escape or hide.


The emptiness of suburbia also applies to Neddys love life. Even though Neddy names his pool path after his wife,
Lucinda, he is cut off from her as well by virtue of his affair with Shirley Adams. The affair, however, also lacks genuine
love. When Neddy thinks about Shirley, he defines love as sexual roughhouse, which is what he looks to for
comfort and warmth. At the end of the story, when Neddy is actually alone and facing his empty house, the true state of
his life is, for the first time, clear. The foundations were flimsy and his relationships weak.
Motifs
Alcohol
The pervasive consumption of alcohol throughout the story sharpens the distortion of time and Neddys sense of
unhappiness. The drinking, serving, and desire for alcohol become significant motivators for Neddy as well as a way to
measure his social standing. At the beginning of the story, everyone is complaining of having drunk too much the night
before, but they have gathered companionably at the Westerhazys pool to drink again. Neddy drinks gin before he
decides to swim from pool to pool, and his swim home is marked as much by fresh drinks as by new swimming pools.
At the Bunkers party, Neddy feels comforted and happy when he is given a drink, whereas at the Biswangers party, he
feels slighted by the way his drink is served. As his journey grows more difficult, Neddy wishes deeply for a drink but is
often turned down, once at the Sachses and once at Shirley Adamss. His desire for a drink grows stronger as he grows
weaker, and the amount of alcohol he has consumed during his journey could explain the harsh, bewildering emotional
place in which Neddy finds himself at the end of the story.
Maps and Exploration
Images of maps and exploration regularly punctuate The Swimmer, highlighting the gap between Neddys perceived
understanding of his happiness and direction in life and the messy confusion that eventually takes over. When Neddy
gets the idea to swim home through the pools in his county, he sees himself as a brave explorer, setting off for the
unknown from a home base that is stable and secure. Neddy likens himself to a legendary figure who is making an
important discovery, and as he begins his journey, he calls himself a pilgrim and an explorer. When Neddy envisions
his friends pools, he sees them through a mapmakers eyes, even though the narrator tells us that Neddys maps are
imaginary at bestthe first hint that Neddys sense of direction and place is flimsy. The lighthearted fantasies about
exploring eventually disappear as Neddys journey grows harder and stranger. By the end of the story, Neddy has literally
lost his way. He thought he was moving through familiar territory, but the home where he finds himself, dark and
empty, is someplace hes never been before.
Symbols
Swimming Pools
The pools that Neddy swims through as he makes his way home represent periods of time that Neddy passes through.
At the beginning of the story, Neddy is strong and active, feels deep contentment with his life, and is admired by his
friends. Warm in the sun, he feels like a legendary figure, as though there is nothing he cant accomplish. As he
progresses from pool to pool, however, Neddy changes. Physically, he grows weaker, unable to pull himself out of pools
without a ladder and unwilling to dive in as he once did. Instead of being warm, he eventually feels chilled to the bone.


Around him, the sunny summer day grows increasingly cooler, and a storm passes. The trees, meanwhile, lose their
leaves, and the constellations change to those of autumn. His standing in his social circle has changed as well. Once
respected and given to snubbing those who arent part of his group, he is now snubbed by Grace Biswanger and the
bartender at her party. Other acquaintances pity him for his misfortunes, which Neddy isnt aware that he has
suffered. A lot has happened as hes been moving from pool to pool, and Neddy has undergone these changes
unwittingly.
Neddy has named the chain of pools the Lucinda River, invoking the security and longevity of his marriage and family,
but his choice of name becomes sad and ironic when he winds up at his dark, deserted home. Neddy has taken Lucinda,
just as he took his comfortable life, for granted. We dont know much about their marriage, but we know of Neddys
affair with Shirley, an affair he treated lightly and to which he attached no meaning. Treating adultery so casually implies
that Neddy assumed that Lucinda would always be there, supportive and secure. When the Lucinda River deposits him
at a lonely, unfamiliar place, he faces the consequences of his actions and harsh reality of the passing years for the first
time.
Changes in Weather and Season
The changes in weather and season that occur throughout The Swimmer mirror Neddys changing life circumstances,
particularly the deterioration of his comfort and security. At the beginning of the story, Neddy is warm in the sunshine,
conscious of nothing but his own happiness and the pleasures of the day. As he begins his swim, the water and air are of
comfortable temperature, and he can walk easily from pool to pool in his swim trunks. Shortly into his journey, a storm
passes, marking a turning point in Neddys plans. He is alone for the first time, waiting out the storm in a deserted
gazebo; and when the storm ends, the warmth is gone. He is chilly, and the red and yellow leaves on the ground suggest
fallNeddy feels a peculiar sadness, the first time he feels anything other than happiness. Weather and season are not
kind to Neddy from this moment on. He gets colder, sees more signs of fall, and changes from a robust traveler into a
pathetic figure by the highway. Autumn arrives in full as Neddy finishes his journey, and the final pool he swims in has
freezing-cold water. Just as Neddys happy life has come to a close, the cycle of seasons has been completed as well, and
it is clear by the end of the story that Neddy is entering the winter of his life.
Cheevers Fictional World
John Cheever is famous for the fictional world within his novels and short stories, a world where wealth and privilege do
not protect his characters from despair, heartbreak, and disaster. Cheever generally sets his fiction in the Northeastern
United States, usually the affluent suburbs of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. His characters are preppy,
wealthy, and white and not above snobbery and elitism. Extramarital affairs, family drama, and family feudsparticular
between brothersare commonplace. Happiness, although seemingly promised by wealth and all its comfortable
trappings, always seems just out of reach. And alcoholprimarily ginplays a prominent role in almost every social
interaction.
The world of The Swimmer is typical Cheever, full of all the trappings of the upper middle class as well as the
persistent malaise that accompanies them. Cheever bombards us with details from Neddys world: in the first paragraph
of the story, he mentions the church, golf course, tennis court, Audubon group, and adults who have been drinking


excessively. Immediately, we understand that this is a wealthy, privileged world, where adults can spend entire afternoons
drinking gin by the poolside, secure with their position in society. Beneath this security and bloated comfort, however,
lie a strict, punitive social hierarchy; fragile relationships; and unhappiness. Neddy experiences some undefined
misfortune that pushes him down in the social ranks, and in his world, the snubbing by a bartender is a significant
offense. He loses track of friends and doesnt even know about their moves or illnesses. He cheats on his wife, abandons
his mistress, and consequently ends up alone. Although not all of Cheevers stories take the surreal, twisting path of
The Swimmer, many revolve around this theme of fragile happiness and existential meaninglessness.
Important Quotations Explained
1. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of
himself as a legendary figure.
This quotation, which appears in the third paragraph of the story, reveals the rosy, self-satisfied view Neddy has of
himself and his world. Neddy has achieved all the trappings of success and is surrounded by friends and family. He takes
comfort in the privileges that his social standing affords, content to know that he is a respected member of society. In
this quotation, he reveals his self-perception: he is original and sees himself as a legendary figure. This idea is
delusional at best, especially because Cheever writes that Neddy has a modest view of himselfenvisioning oneself to
be legendary certainly does not suggest modesty. As The Swimmer progresses, we see that Neddys worldview is
indeed faulty. His friends have become distant acquaintances, his family has disappeared, and he has grown weak. At the
end of the story, Neddy is no longer original or legendary. He is simply cold, alone, and confused.

2. Why, believing as he did, that all human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was he unable to turn back? Why
was he determined to complete his journey even if it meant putting his life in danger? At what point had this prank, this
joke, this piece of horseplay become serious?
This passage, which appears about halfway through the story, suggests that Neddys journey, which had begun as simply
a fun exploit, is actually more meaningful than Neddy had anticipated. Neddy began his pool-to-pool journey with a
view of himself as an explorer, doing something unexpected on an ordinary afternoon. Neddy just wanted to take a new
way home and didnt conceive of it as a life-changing decision. At this point, however, Neddy is standing in his swim
trunks beside a busy highway, and the journey suddenly becomes something more than just a lark. He doesnt
understand why he is persevering or why the journey has become something serious, but he recognizes that the fun is
gone.
This quotation points to a larger idea of The Swimmer as well. Neddy claims to be satisfied and happy with his life,
but he doesnt seem to realize that this life is all he has and his actions have consequences. All his rejected invitations
have gained him enemies and a host of friends kept at arms length. He has also ruined his marriage and apparently lost
his fortune. His life, as the quotation suggests, is indeed serious, not a prank or joke. Just as he feels unable to stop his
strange journey home, he is unable to turn back the clock and make up for past mistakes. There is nowhere to go but
forward, across the highway and on into the future.


The Swimmer: A Midsummer's Nightmare

"'The Swimmer': A Midsummer's Nightmare," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, no. 4, Fall, 1987, pp. 43336.
[In the following essay, Bell compares Cheever's "The Swimmer" to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and
analyzes some of the story's dream imagery. ]
The opening paragraph of John Cheever's "The Swimmer" establishes the common malady lingering poolside at the
Westerhazys' that midsummer Sunday. "We all drank too much," said Lucinda Merrill. While the others talk about their
hangovers, Neddy Merrill sits "by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin." Apparently instead of
talking, Neddy "had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply, stertorously as if he could gulp into his lungs the
components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure." Debilitated by his hangover and his
swim, warmed by the hot sun and cold gin, his deep breathing resonant with heavy snoring sounds, Neddy slips into the
most natural condition given the circumstances: he falls asleep. His pleasure invents a dream of heroic exploration which
ends with a desolate vision within a midsummer's nightmare.
The invitation to transform A Midsummer Night's Dream into "a midsummer's nightmare" is tempting, first, because
Cheever's references to midsummer seem insistent. The story begins, "It was one of those midsummer Sundays. . . ."
About the midpoint, after the wind has stripped the Levys' maple tree of its autumnal leaves, Neddy reasons that "since
it was midsummer the tree must be blighted. . . ." Near his journey's end, under a winter sky, Neddy wonders, "What had
become of the constellations of midsummer?". A further link to the play is the mystifying confusion of the seasons:

The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which. (II.i.111-14)
The transformation seems more than ironic wordplay when we consider another connection to Shakespeare: Cheever's
observation that Neddy "might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one. . . ." Despite
his impression of "youth, sport, and clement weather," Neddy is not a likely subject for a sonnet, at least not for Sonnet
18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate." Alcoholic, snobbish,
adulterous, self-indulgent Neddy is by no means mild or temperate, yet he is linked to the sonnet. He is the other
subject of the poem, the inevitability of decline. Thus, he is compared to the last hours of a summer's day because, like
the season, Neddy's "lease hath all too short a date." As "every fair from fair sometime declines, / By chance or nature's
changing course untrimmed," so Neddy's "eternal summer"his illusory youthful vigor and, more important, his
illusion of success, his share in the tenuous American dreamwill also fade. Whether or not he has actually lost his
money and status, his house and family, in the context of his dream he seems to have lost "possession of that fair [he]
owest." As his pilgrimage to that realization ends, we sense that Neddy has indeed wandered through the valley of the
shadow.
The dream motif (and its direction) having thus been suggested, Neddy snores beside the pool; "the components of that
moment... seemed to flow into his chest." Here the narrative becomes internalized in Neddy. The dream itself begins
and, with it, the "implied progression from day to night, summer to winter, vigorous manhood to old age."
The surrealistic quality of dreams insinuates itself throughout Neddy's journey. With his "discovery" of the Lucinda
River, we see that superior point of view of the dreamer, suspended, detached, not quite real: "He seemed to see, with a
cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county."


Removing "a sweater that was hung over his shoulders" (had it been hung there by someone else?), he plunges into the
stream of his subconscious. "To be embraced and sustained by the light green water... seemed," to Neddy, to be "the
resumption of a natural condition"; the dreamer floats on waves of sleep like the swimmer buoyed by light green water.
When Neddy hears the Bunkers' distant poolside party, "the water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and
seemed to suspend it in midair," distant, disembodied voices made nearer by the trick of water and physics. It is one of
those phenomena of reality that make us recall the dream distortion of sound as well as place and time. When he leaves
the Bunkers', "the brilliant, watery sound of voices fade[s]," as if he leaves some bright sanctuary to pursue his darkening
journey. Near the Lancaster public pool, "the effect of the water on voices, the illusion of brilliance and suspense, was
the same... but the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill...." The distortion will recur at the Biswangers' with
even harsher effects.
Another illustration of the dream motif is Neddy's sense of separation and detachment. As he surveys the scene at the
Bunkers' pool, including the red de Haviland trainer "circling around and around and around in the sky with something
like the glee of a child in a swing," he "felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for the gathering, as if it was
something he might touch." The ambiguity of the word passing is effective. Neddy's "passing affection" may be only
transitory; his nightmare will show that what he holds dear is indeed fleeting. But given the tenderness with which he
regards his own life and this scene of "prosperous men and women," passing suggests rather convincingly its archaic
sense of "great" or "surpassing". For the moment he is held outside that circle rather like Hawthorne's Robin Molineux
when the boy views his family gathered for vespers under the spreading tree in their dooryard.
But the door will not be shut in Neddy's facenot just yet, for he enters this scene as a welcome guest and greets his
fellow players (or playfellows) in a dizzying round of kisses and handshakes, even though the thunder has sounded.
"I had the strangest dream last night I was standing on the shoulder of Route 424, waiting to cross, and I was naked...." So
Neddy, on some other day, waking from some other dream, might well have recounted that common dream image. But
his vulnerability and exposure in this afternoon's dream will probably not be another amusing anecdote told at breakfast.
When he reaches the highway, he is "close to naked," naked enough to be "exposed to all kinds of ridicule," but perhaps
not naked enough to perceive any truths beyond his discomfort and his perplexing inability to turn back. He is genuinely
naked when he steps out of his trunks and through the Hallorans' yellowed beech hedge to encounter something closer
to the naked truth when Mrs. Halloran says,
"We've been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy."
"My misfortunes?" Ned asked. "I don't know what you mean."
"Why, we heard that you'd sold the house and that your poor children. . . ."
"I don't recall having sold the house," Ned said, "and the girls are at home."
Neddy's first response seems natural enough, yet when Mrs. Halloran begins to tell him precisely what she does mean,
he interrupts her. Like unsettling, bright pinpoints of truth abruptly piercing an alcoholic black-out, her explanation hints
at sharp truths that must ultimately be faced. Neddy's reply seems more an evasion than an answer, the suppression of a
dark truth's glimmering. It also suggests the illogical, if not absurd, utterances of dreams.
To discern truth from within or without a dream is difficult enough, but to discern the dream itself from within is more
difficult. For Neddy, it is impossible. Unprepared for the humiliation along Route 424, he is bewildered, but "he could
not go back, he could not even recall with any clearness the green water at the Westerhazys', the sense of inhaling the
day's components, the friendly and relaxed voices saying that they had drunk too much." Caught powerless and unaware
in a nightmare that now controls him, he can only swim with its current. At the Sachses' pool, he still feels obliged to
swim, "that he had no freedom of choice about his means of travel." Just two pools from his own house, obligation has
become compulsion: "While he could have cut directly across the road to his home he went on to the Gilmartins' pool"
and then "staggered with fatigue on his way to the Clydes'."
It is in dreams that apple blossoms and roses are replaced with the "stubborn autumnal fragrance" of chrysanthemums
or marigolds. It is in dreams that midsummer constellations become the stars of a winter sky, and slender, youngish


Neddy Merrill goes "stooped" and "stupified" to whatever truth, whatever self-discovery, his nightmare has led him. "He
had been immersed too long, and his nose and throat were sore from the water," a swimmer's complaint that might be
shared by an afternoon sleeper whose snoring has been too long and loud, and whose dream is too frightening.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, we are told that "the course of true love never did run smooth." Neddy's encounters with
love would seem to bear witness. The easy familiarity with which he greeted his bronze Aphrodite that morning is
rebuffed by Shirley Adams, his former mistress with "hair the color of brass." Despite Neddy's "passing affection," the
course of his real lovehis pursuit of the American dream of success and suburban happinessruns no more
smoothly. Perhaps it too is besieged,

Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion. (I.i.143-49)
In the nightmarish ruin of the "quick bright things" in Neddy's life, he has been led to the vision that his dream of
wealth, status, and happiness is transitory, illusory, and fraught with perils. If our dreams are empty, what then are we?
The use of that discovery, whether for reform or despair, is left to Neddy and to us. Perhaps he will mend his ways, or
(as Prufrock fears) Neddy Merrill may awake from his watery dream only to drownin one way or another.

Source Citation:
Bell, Loren C. "The Swimmer: A Midsummer's Nightmare." EXPLORING Short Stories. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003.
Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson Gale. STONY POINT HIGH SCHOOL. 21 Feb. 2007

Additional Resources:
Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume(s) 3:107; 7:49-50; 11:120; 64:46, 48, 53, 63, 66
World Literature Criticism, volume(s) 2:697
Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 1:94, 100, 102, 106, 108; 38:44, 47-8, 51, 54, 57-61, 63-6, 72, 74, 76; 57:3-34
Reference Guide to American Literature (St. James Press, an imprint of Gale), volume(s) 4:1056-57
Exploring Short Stories



.

The Swimmer
Sample Essay
Adaptedfrom: http://www.123helpme.com/preview.asp?id=92912

John Cheevers story The Swimmer depicts a protaganist, and the society that has nurtured him, as lacking in
seriousness and responsibility. Neddy, the bewildered protagonist, represents a society satirized for centering its
values on social status and materialism. During the course of Neddys journey, the illusions he has constructed about
his life are stripped away, and in the process the truth behind his society is realized. In unveiling the tragedy of
Neddys existence, Cheever reveals the unworthiness of an unexamined life.
The tragedy of Neddys presence leads to his own demise. Through a unique usage of tone, Cheever foreshadows
the misfortunes of the protagonist. Stereotypically, the author hints at the fact that that wealthy people loaf around
and indulge themselves with alcohol to rid themselves of their problems (368). In a mocking manner, almost setting
Neddy up for his failure, the day begins beautiful and everyone is happy, but a feeling of confusion soon follows
(368). Significantly, by exemplifying the point of view, Cheever allows the reader to see Neddy from two different
perspectives. According to Neddy, his life was not confining and the delight he took in observation could not be
explained by its suggestion of escape (368). The bystanders view of Neddy, however, depicts him as close to
naked, as they wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken down, or was he merely a fool
(371). This is the only moment in the entire story wh...



Student Notes: The A&P



Plot Summary: "A & P"

Introduction
John Updike's short story "A & P" was first published in the July 22, 1961 issue of the New Yorker, and was published
again the following year in the author's collection Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. Arthur Mizener's review of the
collection in the New York Times Book Review exalted Updike in terms that soon became commonplace for the writer: "his
natural talent is so great that for some time it has been a positive handicap to him." Almost forty years later, "A & P"
remains Updike's most anthologized story and one of his most popular.
Sammy's encounter with a trio of swim-suited girls in the grocery store where he works encompasses many of the
themes central to adolescence, including accepting the repercussions of one's choices. When Sammy quits in protest of
how the girls were treated by the store's manager, he knows that from now on, the world will be a more difficult place.
Critics have responded enthusiastically to "A & P," and readers' identification with Sammy's predicament has
contributed to the story's popularity. Though little action occurs in the story, Sammy's character is finely drawn in the
space of a few pages and his brush with authority has large implications. He has been compared to Holden Caulfield, J.
D. Salinger's protagonist in Catcher in the Rye, and Walter Wells has suggested that Sammy's moment of protest is similar
to the "epiphany" of the narrator in James Joyce's story "Araby," a comment that places Updike in the pantheon of the
most accomplished writers of the twentieth century. Negative reactions to the story center on what some readers
perceive as Sammy's misogynist views. Other critics consider "A & P" a slight story, though one into which a lifetime of
dignity, choices, and consequences is compressed.
Plot
Sammy, the teenaged narrator, begins the story by describing the three girls who have walked into the A & P grocery
store where he works. They are wearing nothing but bathing suits. He is so distracted by them that he cannot remember
if he rang up a box of crackers or not. As it turns out, he did ring them up, a fact that his customer, "a witch about fifty,"
lets him know quickly and loudly.
He finishes ringing up the customer's items as the girls, who have disappeared down an aisle, circle back into view. He
notices that they are barefoot. He describes each: there's a "chunky one . . . and a tall one [with] a chin that was too
long" and the "queen," whom he imagines is their leader. She catches his eye for a number of reasons, not the least of
which is the fact that the straps of her bathing suit have fallen off her shoulders.
Sammy watches the reactions of the other shoppers to the girls. He refers to the store's other customers as "sheep" and
"a few houseslaves in pink pin curlers." Another clerk, Stokesie, a married twenty-two year old with two children, trades
innuendoes with him. Sammy notes that the store, in a town north of Boston, is five miles from the nearest beach.
The narrator announces that he has come to what his family deems "the sad part" of the story, though he does not
agree. The girls come to his checkout station, and Queenie puts down a jar of herring snacks and pulls a dollar from her
bathing-suit top, a motion that makes Sammy nearly swoon. The store's manager, Lengel, spots the girls and reprimands
them for their attire. Lengel further tells them that they should be decently dressed when they shop at the A & P.
Sammy rings up the girls' items, carefully handling the bill that just came from between Queenie's breasts. Other
customers appear nervous at the scene Lengel has made at the check-out, and the girls are embarrassed and want to
leave quickly. Sammy, in a passionate moment, tells Lengel that he quits. The girls, however, fail to notice his act of
chivalry and continue walking out of the store. Lengel asks him if he said something, and Sammy replies, "I said I quit."


Lengel, a longtime friend of Sammy's parents, tries to talk him out of it, but Sammy folds his apron, puts it on the
counter, punches "No Sale" on the cash register, and walks out. He realizes that the world will be a harder place for him
from now on.
Characters
Sammy: Readers do not learn Sammy's name until the end of the story, even though he is the first-person narrator of
the story. He is a checkout clerk at an A & P supermarket. His language indicates that, at age nineteen, he is both cynical
and romantic. He notes, for instance, that there are "about twenty-seven old freeloaders" working on a sewer main up
the street, and he wonders what the "bum" in "baggy gray pants" could possibly do with "four giant cans of pineapple
juice." Yet, when Queenie approaches him at the checkout, Sammy notes that "with prim look she lifts a folded dollar
bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. . . . Really, I thought that was so cute." He vacillates back
and forth between these extremes of opinion during the story, calling some of his customers "houseslaves in pin
curlers," yet he is sensitive enough that when Lengel makes Queenie blush, he feels "scrunchy inside." At the end of the
story, he quits his job in an effort to be a hero to the girls and as a way of rebelling against a strict society. In a sudden
moment of insightan epiphanyhe realizes "how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter" if he refuses to
follow acceptable paths.
Lengel: Manager of the local A & P, Lengel is a man who spends most of his days behind the door marked "Manager."
Entering the story near the end, he represents the system: management, policy, decency, and the way things are. But he is
not a one-dimensional character. He has known Sammy's parents for a long time, and he tells Sammy that he should, at
least for his parents' sake, not quit his job in such a dramatic, knee-jerk way. He warns Sammy that he will have a hard
time dealing with life from now on, should he quit. He seems truly concerned even while he feels the need to enforce
store policy.
Stokesie: Stokesie is twenty-two, married, and has two children. He works with Sammy at the A & P checkout. He has
little to say or do in this story, though, like Sammy, he observes the girls in the store with interest. He is a glimpse of
what Sammy's future might be like; Stokesie's family "is the only difference" between them, Sammy comments.
Queenie: "Queenie" is the name Sammy gives to the pretty girl who leads her two friends through the grocery store in
their bathing suits. He has never seen her before but immediately becomes infatuated with her. He comments on her
regal and tantalizing appearance. She is somewhat objectified by nineteen-year-old Sammy, who notes the shape of her
body and the seductiveness of the straps which have slipped off her shoulders. When the girls are chastised for their
attire by Lengel, Queenie, who Sammy imagines lives in an upper-middle-class world of backyard swimming pools and
fancy hor d'oeuvres, becomes "sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A &
P must look pretty crummy." Sammy becomes indignant at Lengel's treatment of the girls and tries to help them save
face by quitting his job. Queenie, however, appears not to notice and leaves the store promptly, diminishing the impact
of Sammy's gesture.
Source Citation:
"Plot Summary: 'A & P'." DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center - Gold. Thomson

Additional Resources:
Short Story Criticism, volume(s) 13:372, 398-99; 27:320-30
Reference Guide to Short Fiction (St. James Press, an imprint of Gale), volume(s) 2:735
Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, volume(s) 12:1-10
Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume(s) 214:257-59, 261-62, 305, 328


John Updike
The A&P (text p. 753)

For Teachers
"A & P" is one of John Updike's most anthologized short stories. Originally published in the New
Yorker in 1961, its insight into teenaged angst is still relevant for high school students. It is a
testament to Updike's talents as a writer that he could craft a meaningful and popular story during
this period in the offices of that magazine. The scene was dominated by J. D. Salinger. Like the
legendary Salinger, Updike makes the difficult appear easy. It is only when other writers attempt to
write like them that they encounter the hidden difficulties. Updike is a master stylist. His language is
confident and he is erudite; yet he is never stuffy. And his timing is exceptional. His Rabbit novels
are studies in middle-class existentialism, seemingly as stylistically flat as the suburbs they chronicle,
but every word is exactly right and the mood is never too hot or too cold. It is difficult to write
stories about what people are doing in their neighborhoods, country clubs, and places of business
without being boring, but Updike has done it repeatedly without resorting to gratuitous sex and
violence to be successful. Sex is certainly there in his stories, as it plays a central role in Sammy's
motivation. That is obvious, and it can be imitated. However, one might miss the more compelling
emotion of shame. Sammy is ashamed by the banal commonness of the scene that he has been
identified with. He wants to be different, and he stands up for the mistreated and embarrassed girls
and for himself. It is Updike's signature style, however, to have his gesture go unnoticed by the girls.
Many of Updike's people are at their best in anonymity.
You may decide to ask your students to think of other teenaged semiheroes who resemble Updike's
Sammy. The names will likely come from film. The cast of The Breakfast Club (A&M Films, 1985)
would be likely candidates. This may seem far-fetched, but even Harry Potter shares characteristics
with Sammy; like Updike's character, the teenaged Harry is often in embarrassing situations (often in
front of girls) and at odds with rigid authority figures. This should give us an insight into the reasons
for the popularity of "A & P." It touches on elemental issues in the development of a young man.
Every young man dreams of being a hero, especially to girls he is trying to impress, and when that
dream is spoiled he feels it deeply. Despite the first-person narration, Updike achieves a surprising
breadth in the tone of this story. It is not merely a teenaged complaint against an adult jerk. Ask
students to compare Sammy to other charactersin literature, in film, or on television. Also, you
might ask the boys what they would have done in Sammy's place; then, ask the girls if they would
have noticed, or cared about, Sammy's gesture.

CONNECTIONS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
THE BEDFORD INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE
Inside Connections
"Saving Sourdi," by May-Lee Chai (text p. 130) "The Hand," by Collette (text p. 282)
"Soldier's Home," by Ernest Hemingway (text p. 185) "Revelation," by Flannery O'Connor (text p.
470) Outside Connection
The Catcher in the Rye, by J. LE Salinger


We might as well begin with the ultimate teenaged-angst story and the work that hovered over all of
the New Yorker stories for years. Holden Caulfield and Sammy may not be from similar
backgrounds, but they share a sense of shame at crass behavior aimed at young women.
For Students
WORDS TO KNOW
nubble: a small knob, lump, or piece
mutter: to murmur, grumble, or utter indistinctly or in a low tone
varicose veins: the condition of having dilated or swollen veins, most often in the legs wax: a
phonograph record
tony: characterized by an elegant or exclusive quality or manner
can: slang for a person's posterior
kingpins: the most important figures in an enterprise or system
1. Consider the title and setting. What is ironic about setting the story in a small-town supermarket
and about the name of the store?
2 Make a list of the words Sammy uses to describe the men and women who shop in the A & P.
After looking over the word list, how would you describe his attitude toward these people?
3. How is Sammy's character revealed through his description of the customers; his boss, Mr.
Lengle; and his coworker, Stokesie?
4. How is Queenie described? What is Sammy's attitude toward Queenie?
5. What is significant about white as a motif in the story?
6. There is a shift in the story when Sammy says, Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least
my family says it's sad, but I don't think it's so sad myself' (para. 12). What does Sammy mean by
this?
7. What's ironic about Sammy's quitting his job? Why is he the girls' "unsuspected hero"?
8. What does this story say about choices and their consequences? Explain your answer. Is Sammy
aware of the consequences of his choice?
9. What is the nature of Sammy's epiphany at the end of the story? I 0 What is the author's purpose
in telling the story?
1. How do the time, the place, and the social environment help to develop the characters in this
story? How do they evoke the mood and atmosphere developed by the author?
2. Motifs and allusions add to the complexity of the story. Name and discuss the motifs and
allusions found in "A & P" and explain how they reinforce the central theme.
1. The central theme of the story can best be described as
a. playing the hero doesn't always work.
b. finding out what we really want to do with our lives often involves pain.
c. dead-end jobs do serve a purpose.
d. the people we meet can influence our lives.
e. sometimes its better to listen to advice even if we don't like it.

2. The phrase "I slid right down into her living room' is an example of
a. onomatopoeia.


b. imagery.
c. metaphor
d. simile.
e. litotes.

3. The narrator's description of Queenie as "She didn't look around, not this queen, she just
walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima- donna legs" can best be described as
a. disgust.
b. detachment.
c. fascination.
d. tenderness.
e. navet.

4. The style of this story is most accurately characterized as
a. dry.
b. lyrically elegant.
c. deceptively simple.
d. flowery.
e. spare.

5. Updike uses all of the following EXCEPT
a. repetition.
b. allusions.
c. imagery.
d. metaphor
e. personification.

6. The narrator is
a. the manager of a specialty store.
b. a seasonal, part-time worker at the A & P.
c. Sammy, a young grocery clerk.
d. a married clerk at the A & P.
e. a happy, placid teenager.

7. Updike's style can best be described as
a. ornate, elaborate, flowery.
b. abrupt, staccato.
c. elegant.
d. humorous, self-deprecating.
e. terse, laconic.

8. What does the character of Queenie symbolize?
a. The kind of life the narrator will never live if he stays at the A & P.
b. The girl the narrator will many someday.
c. The narrator's family.


d. The typical customer who frequents the A & P
e. The kind of life the narrator is living.

SIMULATED AP ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. Discuss how Updike's use of setting establishes the theme in "A & P"
2. Discuss how the rhetorical and literary devices contribute to our understanding of the story.
Consider the following: repetition, motifs and symbols, allusions, and metaphor.

1. How is "A & P" a hero-myth story?
2. Read James Joyce's short story "Araby." Compare and contrast the narrators in each story.


John Updike's "A & P": a Return Visit to Araby
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1993 by Walter Wells
John Updike's penchant for appropriating great works of literature and giving them contemporary restatement in his
own fiction is abundantly documented--as is the fact that, among his favorite sources, James Joyce looms large.(1)
With special affinity for Dubliners, Updike has, by common acknowledgment, written at least one short story that
strongly resembles the acclaimed "Araby," not only in plot and theme, but in incidental detail. That story, the 1960
"You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You"--like "Araby"--tells the tale of a poor, romantically infatuated
young boy who, though obstructed by parental slowness, journeys with innocent urgency, coins in hand, to a seemingly
magical carnival--only to find there, behind its facades, just a sleazy, money grasping, sexually tinged reality that
frustrates and embitters him. Both stories draw on the Christian imagery of Bunyan's Vanity Fair episode to trace a
modern boy's passage from innocence to experience, and to expose some of the pains and complexities of that passage.
Notwithstanding "Araby'"s cachet as one of the great short stories in the English language, at least two critics have
found "You'll Never Know, Dear" to be "a far more complex story."(2)
What remains unacknowledged, I think, is that shortly after writing "You'll Never Know, Dear," Updike made a second
fictional excursion to Araby. This time he transformed Joyce's latter-day Vanity Fair, not into a cheaply exotic
destination for a starry-eyed youngster, but into the richly resonant single setting for an older adolescent's sad tale: a tale
of the modern supermarket. The resulting story, since its publication in 1962, has been Updike's most frequently
anthologized: the popular "A & P." Updike even signals his intention for us at the outset, giving his story a title that
metrically echoes Joyce's: Araby . . . A & P. (Grand Union or Safeway would not suffice.)
Like "Araby," "A & P" is told after the fact by a young man now much the wiser, presumably, for his frustrating
infatuation with a beautiful but inaccessible girl whose allure excites him into confusing his sexual impulses for those of
honor and chivalry. The self-delusion in both cases leads quickly to an emotional fall.
At 19, Updike's protagonist, Sammy, is a good bit older than Joyce's--at the opposite end of adolescence, it would seem.
While in Joyce's boy we readily believe such confusion between the gallant and profane, I think we needn't assume that
Sammy is likewise unable to distinguish between the two quite normal impulses. His attraction to the girl in the aisle is
certainly far more anatomically and less ambiguously expressed than that of Joyce's boy to Mangan's sister. But it is
Beauty that confounds the issue. When human aesthetics come into play, when the object of a young man's carnal desire
also gratifies him aesthetically, that is when the confusion arises. In Irish-Catholic Dublin of the 1890s,(3) Such youthful
beauty not surprisingly invokes analogies between Mangan's sister and the Queen of Heaven (though the swinging of her
body and "the soft rope of her hair toss[ing] from side to side" [Joyce 30]), which captivate the boy, hint at something
less spiritual than Madonna worship). And while beauty's benchmarks in Sammy's more secular mid-century America are
more anatomical than spiritual, Updike does have Sammy call his young femme fatal "Queenie," and he does make her
the center of a "trinity" of sorts, showing her two friends at one point "huddl[ing] against her for relief" ("A & P" 189).
Once smitten, both young protagonists become distracted, agitated, disoriented. Joyce's turns impatient "with the serious
work of life" (Joyce 32). His teacher accuses him of idling. His heart leaps, his thoughts wander, his body responds "like
a harp" to the words and gestures of Mangan's sister, which run "like fingers . . . upon the wires" (31). Similarly, Updike's
young hero can't remember, from the moment he spots Queenie in the aisle, which items he has rung up on the cash
register.
Even details in the two stories are similar, Updike clearly taking his cues from "Araby." Both boys are excited by
specified whiteness about the girls--Joyce's boy by "the white curve of her neck" and "the white border of [her]
petticoat" in the glow of Dublin lamplight (Joyce 32), Sammy by the "long white prima-donna legs" ("A & P" 188) and
the white shoulders to which he refers repeatedly. "Could [there]," he wonders, "have been anything whiter than those
shoulders[?]" (189). Joyce's boy also observes a nimbus surrounding Mangan's sister, "her figure defined by the light
from the half-opened door" (30). True, Mangan's sister comports herself more humbly than her American counterpart.
Queenie walks, heavy-heeled and head high, with the haughty pride of the affluent, secularized American upper middle


class. But her enticing whiteness, in Updike's sly parody, is also given a luminous, halo-like quality: "around the top of
the cloth," says Sammy of the bathing suit that "had slipped a little on her . . . there was this shining rim" (189).


The Art of John Updike's "A & P"
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1997 by Toni Saldivar
John Updike's best known, most anthologized and most frequently taught short story, "A & P," first appeared in The
New Yorker (22 July 1961: 22-24), a publication that assumes a reader with considerable literary and cultural knowledge.
Updike, for whom literature and art have been intertwined since youth,(1) uses allusions to art and to art criticism to give
the informed reader of "A & P" the experience of dramatic irony as a means toward constructing significance for the
story. The popularity of "A & P" rests on a number of ironic ambiguities,(2) but the reader who perceives Updike's
allusions to art can take special pleasure in the plot, which leaves the nineteen-year-old narrator and protagonist, Sammy,
feeling at the end both triumphant and sad, both winner and loser.
The setting is a small town north of Boston around 1960. Sammy is trying to clarify why he has impulsively quit his job
as a cashier in the local A & P supermarket. He needs a sympathetic listener (or reader), someone who will grasp the
meaning he is constructing for himself as he puts his actions into narrative order. Collapsing past and present in rapid
yet reflective colloquial speech, Sammy tells how three teenage girls, barefoot, in bathing suits, came into the A & P store
to make a purchase. As they move through the aisles, Sammy, from his work station, first ogles them and then idealizes
the prettiest and most confident of the three. He names her, to himself, "Queenie"; and though he jokes with his fellow
cashier about the girls' sexiness, he is quietly disgusted by the butcher's frankly lustful gaze as the girls search for what
they want to buy. Worse is his manager's puritanical rebuke for their beach attire as Queenie pays Sammy for her
purchase. Outraged that his manager, Lengel, has made "that pretty girl blush" and wanting to demonstrate his refusal of
such demeaning authority, Sammy quits his job on the spot. Though the girls leave without recognizing their hero, and
though his manager tries to dissuade him from disappointing his parents, Sammy feels "that once you begin a gesture, it's
fatal not to go through with it" (196). He acts decisively, but the girls have disappeared from the parking lot by the time
he exits the store. In practical terms, Sammy's action has gained him nothing and cost him everything, but his narrative
affirms his gesture as a liberating form of dissent.(3) Sammy does not see how he could have done otherwise, though he
finds himself at odds with the only society he knows, sure that "the world will be hard to me, hereafter" (196).
Because Updike wrote "A & P" for The New Yorker, the story assumes a reader whose response to Sammy can go far
beyond what the character can articulate for himself.(4) Walter Wells, calling attention to the elevated diction which
concludes Sammy's highly "ambivalent" epiphany, suggests that "hereafter" points Sammy toward an indefinite future in
which he may or may not find "viable alternatives" to a "defunct romanticism" (133). I hope to show in this essay that
Updike offers the reader a way to see that Sammy's narrative, as a completed artistic gesture, is already in the mode of
one of those alternatives. Sammy does look ahead as he senses the inadequacy of available cultural forms to express his
sexuality and his moral sensitivity. Sammy does not, however, renounce the source of his will to act as he did. That
source is triple: first, the ability to respond erotically to the beauty of a young woman's body; second, to respond
sympathetically and imaginatively to the individual person alive in that body; and third, to elaborate that double pleasure
into expressive form. If Sammy has learned anything at the end of his story, he has learned it via his romantic desire
which, though naive and selfdramatizing, drives the plot of "A & P." We can think of Sammy's narrative as Updike's
gesture to give Eros a form that will both ennoble and extend it as an aesthetic pleasure--while intensifying the
impossibility of that desire's completing itself in anything other than art. In other words, Updike has created in Sammy a
character who attains the awareness of a modern artist, but who does not know that is what he has done.
To a large extent, the aesthetic pleasure in "A & P" depends upon the reader's sensing this dramatic irony. Sammy's
words resonate and gain meaning through a larger artistic context out of which he comes (Updike's knowledge and
imagination) but of which he, the fictive character, is unaware. Updike offers the reader this particular irony through a
playful and highly specific allusion to a work of art and to the corresponding modern aesthetic criticism it helped inspire.
That allusion, unconscious on Sammy's part but certainly not on Updike's, is to Sandro Botticelli's fifteenth-century
Neo-Platonic painting, usually referred to as The Birth of Venus (c. 1482). In design, the painting recalls a medieval
triptych, but its central figure is the Greek goddess of love, nude and pensive, standing tall in her scallop shell as she is
blown ashore from her sea-birth by a male figure emblematic of wind or spirit. Venus is flanked by two female forms,
one entwined with the wind and the other about to receive her on shore with a regal mantle. These two attendants have


been identified as the Horae, allegorical figures for time. The painting's details are realistic, but the overall effect is
ethereal, gorgeous, and sad. For all its allegory, Botticelli's Venus, in Ronald Lightbown's commentary, is "the first
surviving celebration [in the history of the Renaissance] of the beauty of the female nude, represented for its own
perfection rather than with erotic or moral overtones ... the celebration is almost impressionistic ... Venus is indifferent
to us" (1:89).


A&P Notes to Ponder for Composition Improvement
Adapted from: http://www.gwd50.k12.sc.us/SPHS-Web/K_Bradley_2006-2007 SYLLABUS PAGES--full version.htm

What is What could be
A&P by John Updike is a short story in which a
teenage cashier worker at the aforementioned store
makes a life changing decision because of three bathing
suit clad girls.
John Updikes short story A&P narrates the
circumstances under which a teenage cashier makes a life-
changing decision because of three girls in bathing suits.
The teenager named Sammy decides to quit his job at the
A&P after watching three girls in bathing suits get fussed
at by the store manager for coming into the store and not
looking decent.
The teenager Sammy decides to quit his job at the A&P
after watching the store manager reprimand three girls in
bathing suits for coming into the store indecently
dressed.
His decision to quit is one of the reasons why Sammy is
perceived to be a teenage boy that is nave, immature,
sexist, of the lower class, and of lower intelligence.
His decision shows Sammy as a teenage boy who is nave,
immature, and middle-class.
John Updike is able to create and show these
characteristics by writing in the first person point of view,
and by using figurative language and irony.
John Updike characterizes Sammy through first-person
point of view, figurative language, and irony.

Then Sammy goes on to say of a customer Shes one of
those cash-register watchers, a witch about fifty
Then, Sammy continues by describing a customer as one
of those cash-register watchers, a witch about fifty.
It can be understood from this statement that Sammy has
little respect for his elders and to the customers that give
him a paycheck.
Clearly, Sammy feels little respect for his customers,
without whom he would have no job.

A&P is told in the first person point of view, by
Sammy.
Sammy is the storys first-person narrator.

Updike creates a story of ordinary life in a typical town
with his point of view, figurative language, and irony.
Sammy is an exceptional character who dislikes his life
and in the end changes it by quitting his job. This
experience is common and many can relate to it. After
someone quits a job, they often dont know what they are
going to do, but they know life will be hard.
With point of view, figurative language, and irony,
Updikes creates a story of one teenagers ordinary life in a
typical small town.


"A & P" Essay Question

"...my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter."

Write an essay in which you explain how John Updike's use of stylistic devices such as point of view, figurative
language, and irony effectively develop the character of Sammy, thus enlightening the reader to the way that
he feels at the end of the story.

Besides point of view and figurative language, Updike uses
irony to develop Sammys character.
To complement the effectiveness of the storys point of
view and figurative language in developing Sammys
character, Updike also uses irony.
Sammys sarcastic personality is seen again in a comment
made about Stokesie. Verbal irony is present when Sammy
comments on Stokesies future position at the A&P.
Through verbal irony, Sammy sarcastically comments
about Stokesies future position at the A&P.
The fact that Sammy calls Stokesie a responsible married
man is ironic because he already has two kids at the age of
twenty-two.
The irony is that Stokesie, a responsible married man,
already has two kids at the age of twenty-two.
John Updikes use of point of view, figurative language,
and irony in the story A&P,effectively develops the
character of Sammy thus enlightening the reader to the way
he feels at the end of the story.
John Updikes use of point of view, figurative language,
and irony effectively develops Sammys personality and
enlightens the reader to the way this young protagonist
feels at the end of the story.
Updike develops this character in such a way as to make
him travel a different path or to stray from what he is
accustomed to.
Sammy decides to travel a different path or to stray from
what is customary for him.
Updike allows the characters to develop through the
devices of point of view, figurative language, and irony.
The reader is presented the point of view by Sammy, a
teenage boy. He interprets many of the materials in the
story to the reader through figurative language. Irony
presents meaning to the story.

(weak conclusion)


XIX. Stories for Compositions



The Scarlet Ibis
by James Hurst
Summer was dead, but autumn had not yet been born when the ibis came
to the bleeding tree. It's strange that all this is so clear to me, now that
time has had its way. But sometimes (like right now) I sit in the cool
green parlor, and I remember Doodle.
Doodle was about the craziest brother a boy ever had. Doodle was born
when I was seven and was, from the start, a disappointment. He seemed
all head, with a tiny body that was red and shriveled like an old man's.
Everybody thought he was going to die.
Daddy had the carpenter build a little coffin, and when he was three months old, Mama and Daddy
named him William Armstrong. Such a name sounds good only on a tombstone.
When he crawled on the rug, he crawled backward, as if he were in reverse and couldn't change
gears. This made him look like a doodlebug, so I began calling him 'Doodle.' Renaming my brother
was probably the kindest thing I ever did for him, because nobody expects much from someone
called Doodle.
Daddy built him a cart and I had to pull him around. If I so much as picked up my hat, he'd start
crying to go with me; and Mama would call from wherever she was, "Take Doodle with you."
So I dragged him across the cotton field to share the beauty of Old Woman Swamp. I lifted him out
and sat him down in the soft grass. He began to cry.
"What's the matter?"
"It's so pretty, Brother, so pretty."
After that, Doodle and I often went down to Old Woman Swamp.
There is inside me (and with sadness I have seen it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream
of love. And at times I was mean to Doodle. One time I showed him his casket, telling him how we
all believed he would die. When I made him touch the casket, he screamed. And even when we were
outside in the bright sunshine he clung to me, crying, "Don't leave me, Brother! Don't leave me!"
Doodle was five years old when I turned 13. I was embarrassed at having a brother of that age who
couldn't walk, so I set out to teach him. We were down in Old Woman Swamp. "I'm going to teach
you to walk, Doodle," I said.


"Why?"
"So I won't have to haul you around all the time."
"I can't walk, Brother."
"Who says so?"
"Mama, the doctoreverybody."
"Oh, you can walk." I took him by the arms and stood him up. He collapsed on to the grass like a
half-empty flour sack. It was as if his little legs had no bones.
"Don't hurt me, Brother."
"Shut up. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to teach you to walk." I heaved him up again, and he
collapsed.
"I just can't do it."
"Oh, yes, you can, Doodle. All you got to do is try. Now come on," and I hauled him up once more.
It seemed so hopeless that it's a miracle I didn't give up. But all of us must have something to be
proud of, and Doodle had become my something.
Finally one day he stood alone for a few seconds. When he fell, I grabbed him in my arms and
hugged him, our laughter ringing through the swamp like a bell. Now we knew it could be done.
We decided not to tell anyone until he was actually walking. At breakfast on our chosen day I
brought Doodle to the door in the cart. I helped Doodle up; and when he was standing alone, I let
them look. There wasn't a sound as Doodle walked slowly across the room and sat down at the
table. Then Mama began to cry and ran over to him, hugging him and kissing him. Daddy hugged
him, too. Doodle told them it was I who had taught him to walk, so they wanted to hug me, and I
began to cry.
"What are you crying for?" asked Daddy, but I couldn't answer. They didn't know that I did it just
for myself, that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother.
Within a few months, Doodle had learned to walk well. Since I had succeeded in teaching Doodle to
walk, I began to believe in my own infallibility. I decided to teach him to run, to row, to swim, to
climb trees, and to fight. Now he, too, believed in me; so, we set a deadline when Doodle could start
school.
But Doodle couldn't keep up with the plan. Once, he collapsed on the ground and began to cry.


"Aw, come on, Doodle. You can do it. Do you want to be different from everybody else when you
start school?"
"Does that make any difference?"
"It certainly does. Now, come on."
And so we came to those days when summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born. It was
Saturday noon, just a few days before the start of school. Daddy, Mama, Doodle, and I were seated
at the dining room table, having lunch. Suddenly from out in the yard came a strange croaking noise.
Doodle stopped eating. "What's that?" He slipped out into the yard, and looked up into the bleeding
tree. "It's a big red bird!"
Mama and Daddy came out. On the topmost branch perched a bird the size of a chicken, with
scarlet feathers and long legs.
At that moment, the bird began to flutter. It tumbled down through the bleeding tree and landed at
our feet with a thud. Its graceful neck jerked twice and then straightened out, and the bird was still.
It lay on the earth like a broken vase of red flowers, and even death could not mar its beauty.
"What is it?" Doodle asked.
"It's a scarlet ibis," Daddy said.
Sadly, we all looked at the bird. How many miles had it traveled to die like this, in our yard, beneath
the bleeding tree?
Doodle knelt beside the ibis. "I'm going to bury him."
As soon as I had finished eating, Doodle and I hurried off to Horsehead Landing. It was time for a
swimming lesson, but Doodle said he was too tired. When we reached Horsehead landing, lightning
was flashing across half the sky, and thunder was drowning out the sound of the sea.
Doodle was both tired and frightened. He slipped on the mud and fell. I helped him up, and he
smiled at me ashamedly. He had failed and we both knew it. He would never be like the other boys
at school.
We started home, trying to beat the storm. The lightning was near now. The faster I walked, the
faster he walked, so I began to run.
The rain came, roaring through the pines. And then, like a bursting Roman candle, a gum tree ahead
of us was shattered by a bolt of lightning. When the deafening thunder had died, I heard Doodle cry
out, "Brother, Brother, don't leave me! Don't leave me!"


The knowledge that our plans had come to nothing was bitter, and that streak of cruelty within me
awakened. I ran as fast as I could, leaving him far behind with a wall of rain dividing us. Soon I
could hear his voice no more.
I stopped and waited for Doodle. The sound of rain was everywhere, but the wind had died and it
fell straight down like ropes hanging from the sky.
I peered through the downpour, but no one came. Finally I went back and found him huddled
beneath a red nightshade bush beside the road. He was sitting on the ground, his face buried in his
arms, which were resting on drawn-up knees. "Let's go, Doodle."
He didn't answer so I gently lifted his head. He toppled backward onto the earth. He had been
bleeding from the mouth, and his neck and the front of his shirt were stained a brilliant red.
"Doodle, Doodle." There was no answer but the ropy rain. I began to weep, and the tear-blurred
vision in red before me looked very familiar. "Doodle!" I screamed above the pounding storm and
threw my body to the earth above his. For a long time, it seemed forever, I lay there crying,
sheltering my fallen scarlet ibis


The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

I
AS GREGOR SAMSA awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in
his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he
lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on
top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His
numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before
his eyes.
What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only
rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of
cloth samples was unpacked and spread outSamsa was a commercial travelerhung the picture
which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a
lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur
muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!
Gregor's eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast skyone could hear rain drops beating
on the window guttermade him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and
forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleep on
his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However violently he
forced himself towards his right side he always rolled on to his back again. He tried it at least a
hundred times, shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs, and only desisted when he
began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never experienced before.
Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting job I've picked on! Traveling about day in, day out. It's
much more irritating work than doing the actual business in the office, and on top of that there's the
trouble of constant traveling, of worrying about train connections, the bed and irregular meals,
casual acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends. The devil take it all! He
felt a slight itching up on his belly; slowly pushed himself on his back nearer to the top of the bed so
that he could lift his head more easily; identified the itching place which was surrounded by many
small white spots the nature of which he could not understand and made to touch it with a leg, but
drew the leg back immediately, for the contact made a cold shiver run through him.
He slid down again into his former position. This getting up early, he thought, makes one quite
stupid. A man needs his sleep. Other commercials live like harem women. For instance, when I
come back to the hotel of a morning to write up the orders I've got, these others are only sitting
down to breakfast. Let me just try that with my chief; I'd be sacked on the spot. Anyhow, that might
be quite a good thing for me, who can tell? If I didn't have to hold my hand because of my parents
I'd have given notice long ago, I'd have gone to the chief and told him exactly what I think of him.
That would knock him endways from his desk! It's a queer way of doing, too, this sitting on high at a
desk and talking down to employees, especially when they have to come quite near because the chief


is hard of hearing. Well, there's still hope; once I've saved enough money to pay back my parents'
debts to himthat should take another five or six yearsI'll do it without fail. I'll cut myself
completely loose then. For the moment, though, I'd better get up, since my train goes at five.
He looked at the alarm clock ticking on the chest. Heavenly Father! he thought. It was half-past six
o'clock and the hands were quietly moving on, it was even past the half-hour, it was getting on
toward a quarter to seven. Had the alarm clock not gone off? From the bed one could see that it had
been properly set for four o'clock; of course it must have gone off. Yes, but was it possible to sleep
quietly through that ear-splitting noise? Well he had not slept quietly, yet apparently all the more
soundly for that. But what was he to do now? The next train went at seven o'clock; to catch that he
would need to hurry like mad and his samples weren't even packed up, and he himself wasn't feeling
particularly fresh and active. And even if he did catch the train he wouldn't avoid a row with the
chief, since the firm's porter would have been waiting for the five o'clock train and would have long
since reported his failure to turn up. The porter was a creature of the chief's, spineless and stupid.
Well, supposing he were to say he was sick? But that would be most unpleasant and would look
suspicious, since during his five years' employment he had not been ill once. The chief himself
would be sure to come with the sick-insurance doctor, would reproach his parents with their son's
laziness and would cut all excuses short by referring to the insurance doctor, who of course regarded
all mankind as perfectly healthy malingerers. And would he be so far wrong on this occasion?
Gregor really felt quite well, apart from a drowsiness that was utterly superfluous after such a long
sleep, and he was even unusually hungry.
As all this was running through his mind at top speed without his being able to decide to leave his
bedthe alarm clock had just struck a quarter to seventhere came a cautious tap at the door
behind the head of his bed. "Gregor," said a voiceit was his mother's"it's a quarter to seven.
Hadn't you a train to catch?" That gentle voice! Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice
answering hers, unmistakably his own voice, it was true, but with a persistent horrible twittering
squeak behind it like an undertone, that left the words in their clear shape only for the first moment
and then rose up reverberating round them to destroy their sense, so that one could not be sure one
had heard them rightly. Gregor wanted to answer at length and explain everything, but in the
circumstances he confined himself to saying: "Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I'm getting up now." The
wooden door between them must have kept the change in his voice from being noticeable outside,
for his mother contented herself with this statement and shuffled away. Yet this brief exchange of
words had made the other members of the family aware that Gregor was still in the house, as they
had not expected, and at one of the side doors his father was already knocking, gently, yet with his
fist. "Gregor, Gregor," he called, "what's the matter with you?" And after a little while he called
again in a deeper voice: "Gregor! Gregor!" At the other side door his sister was saying in a low,
plaintive tone: "Gregor? Aren't you well? Are you needing anything?" He answered them both at
once: "I'm just ready," and did his best to make his voice sound as normal as possible by enunciating
the words very clearly and leaving long pauses between them. So his father went back to his
breakfast, but his sister whispered: "Gregor, open the door, do." However, he was not thinking of
opening the door, and felt thankful for the prudent habit he had acquired in traveling of locking all
doors during the night, even at home.
His immediate intention was to get up quietly without being disturbed, to put on his clothes and
above all eat his breakfast, and only then to consider what else was to be done, since in bed, he was
well aware, his meditations would come to no sensible conclusion. He remembered that often


enough in bed he had felt small aches and pains, probably caused by awkward postures, which had
proved purely imaginary once he got up, and he looked forward eagerly to seeing this morning's
delusions gradually fall away. That the change in his voice was nothing but the precursor of a severe
chill, a standing ailment of commercial travelers, he had not the least possible doubt.
To get rid of the quilt was quite easy; he had only to inflate himself a little and it fell off by itself. But
the next move was difficult, especially because he was so uncommonly broad. He would have
needed arms and hands to hoist himself up; instead he had only the numerous little legs which never
stopped waving in all directions and which he could not control in the least. When he tried to bend
one of them it was the first to stretch itself straight; and did he succeed at last in making it do what
he wanted, all the other legs meanwhile waved the more wildly in a high degree of unpleasant
agitation. "But what's the use of lying idle in bed," said Gregor to himself.
He thought that he might get out of bed with the lower part of his body first, but this lower part,
which he had not yet seen and of which he could form no clear conception, proved too difficult to
move; it shifted so slowly; and when finally, almost wild with annoyance, he gathered his forces
together and thrust out recklessly, he had miscalculated the direction and bumped heavily against the
lower end of the bed, and the stinging pain he felt informed him that precisely this lower part of his
body was at the moment probably the most sensitive.
So he tried to get the top part of himself out first, and cautiously moved his head towards the edge
of the bed. That proved easy enough, and despite its breadth and mass the bulk of his body at last
slowly followed the movement of his head. Still, when he finally got his head free over the edge of
the bed he felt too scared to go on advancing, for after all if he let himself fall in this way it would
take a miracle to keep his head from being injured. And at all costs he must not lose consciousness
now, precisely now; he would rather stay in bed.
But when after a repetition of the same efforts he lay in his former position again, sighing, and
watched his little legs struggling against each other more wildly than ever, if that were possible, and
saw no way of bringing any order into this arbitrary confusion, he told himself again that it was
impossible to stay in bed and that the most sensible course was to risk everything for the smallest
hope of getting away from it. At the same time he did not forget meanwhile to remind himself that
cool reflection, the coolest possible, was much better than desperate resolves. In such moments he
focused his eyes as sharply as possible on the window, but, unfortunately, the prospect of the
morning fog, which muffled even the other side of the narrow street, brought him little
encouragement and comfort. "Seven o'clock already," he said to himself when the alarm clock
chimed again, "seven o'clock already and still such a thick fog." And for a little while he lay quiet,
breathing lightly, as if perhaps expecting such complete repose to restore all things to their real and
normal condition.
But then he said to himself: "Before it strikes a quarter past seven I must be quite out of this bed,
without fail. Anyhow, by that time someone will have come from the office to ask for me, since it
opens before seven." And he set himself to rocking his whole body at once in a regular rhythm, with
the idea of swinging it out of the bed. If he tipped himself out in that way he could keep his head
from injury by lifting it at an acute angle when he fell. His back seemed to be hard and was not likely
to suffer from a fall on the carpet. His biggest worry was the loud crash he would not be able to help
making, which would probably cause anxiety, if not terror, behind all the doors. still he must take the
risk.


When he was already half out of the bedthe new method was more a game than an effort, for he
needed only to hitch himself across by rocking to and froit struck him how simple it would be if
he could get help. Two strong peoplehe thought of his father and the servant girlwould be
amply sufficient; they would only have to thrust their arms under his convex back, lever him out of
the bed, bend down with their burden and then be patient enough to let him turn himself right over
on to the floor, where it was to be hoped his legs would then find their proper function. Well,
ignoring the fact that the doors were all locked, ought he really to call for help? In spite of his misery
he could not suppress a smile at the very idea of it.
He had got so far that he could barely keep his equilibrium when he rocked himself strongly, and he
would have to nerve himself very soon for the final decision since in five minutes' time it would be a
quarter past sevenwhen the front door bell rang. "That's someone from the office," he said to
himself, and grew almost rigid, while his little legs only jigged about all the faster. For a moment
everything stayed quiet. "They're not going to open the door," said Gregor to himself, catching at
some kind of irrational hope. But then of course the servant girl went as usual to the door with her
heavy tread and opened it. Gregor needed only to hear the first good morning of the visitor to know
immediately who it wasthe chief clerk himself. What a fate, to be condemned to work for a firm
where the smallest omission at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all employees in a body
nothing but scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he
wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in a morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be
driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed? Wouldn't it really have been
sufficient to send an apprentice to inquireif any inquiry were necessary at alldid the chief clerk
himself have to come and thus indicate to the entire family, an innocent family, that this suspicious
circumstance could be investigated by no one less versed in affairs than himself? And more through
the agitation caused by these reflections than through any act of will Gregor swung himself out of
bed with all his strength. There was a loud thump, but it was not really a crash. His fall was broken
to some extent by the carpet, his back, too, was less stiff than he thought, and so there was merely a
dull thud, not so very startling. Only he had not lifted his head carefully enough and had hit it; he
turned it and rubbed it on the carpet in pain and irritation.
"That was something falling down in there," said the chief clerk in the next room to the left. Gregor
tried to suppose to himself that something like what had happened to him today might some day
happen to the chief clerk; one really could not deny that it was possible. But as if in brusque reply to
this supposition the chief clerk took a couple of firm steps in the next-door room and his patent
leather boots creaked. From the right-hand room his sister was whispering to inform him of the
situation: "Gregor, the chief clerk's here." "I know," muttered Gregor to himself; but he didn't dare
to make his voice loud enough for his sister to hear it.
"Gregor," said his father now from the left-hand room, "the chief clerk has come and wants to
know why you didn't catch the early train. We don't know what to say to him. Besides, he wants to
talk to you in person. So open the door, please. He will be good enough to excuse the untidiness of
your room." "Good morning, Mr. Samsa," the chief clerk was calling amiably meanwhile. "He's not
well," said his mother to the visitor, while his father was still speaking through the door, "he's not
well, sir, believe me. What else would make him miss a train! The boy thinks about nothing but his
work. It makes me almost cross the way he never goes out in the evenings; he's been here the last
eight days and has stayed at home every single evening. He just sits there quietly at the table reading
a newspaper or looking through railway timetables. The only amusement he gets is doing fretwork.


For instance, he spent two or three evenings cutting out a little picture frame; you would be
surprised to see how pretty it is; it's hanging in his room; you'll see it in a minute when Gregor opens
the door. I must say I'm glad you've come, sir; we should never have got him to unlock the door by
ourselves; he's so obstinate; and I'm sure he's unwell, though he wouldn't have it to be so this
morning." "I'm just coming," said Gregor slowly and carefully, not moving an inch for fear of losing
one word of the conversation. "I can't think of any other explanation, madam," said the chief clerk,
"I hope it's nothing serious. Although on the other hand I must say that we men of business
fortunately or unfortunatelyvery often simply have to ignore any slight indisposition, since
business must be attended to." "Well, can the chief clerk come in now?" asked Gregor's father
impatiently, again knocking on the door. "No," said Gregor. In the left-hand room a painful silence
followed this refusal, in the right-hand room his sister began to sob.
Why didn't his sister join the others? She was probably newly out of bed and hadn't even begun to
put on her clothes yet. Well, why was she crying? Because he wouldn't get up and let the chief clerk
in, because he was in danger of losing his job, and because the chief would begin dunning his
parents again for the old debts? Surely these were things one didn't need to worry about for the
present. Gregor was still at home and not in the least thinking of deserting the family. At the
moment, true, he was lying on the carpet and no one who knew the condition he was in could
seriously expect him to admit the chief clerk. But for such a small discourtesy, which could plausibly
be explained away somehow later on, Gregor could hardly be dismissed on the spot. And it seemed
to Gregor that it would be much more sensible to leave him in peace for the present than to trouble
him with tears and entreaties. Still, of course, their uncertainty bewildered them all and excused their
behavior.
"Mr. Samsa," the chief clerk called now in a louder voice, "what's the matter with you? Here you are,
barricading yourself in your room, giving only 'yes' and 'no' for answers, causing your parents a lot of
unnecessary trouble and neglectingI mention this only in passingneglecting your business duties
in an incredible fashion. I am speaking here in the name of your parents and of your chief, and I beg
you quite seriously to give me an immediate and precise explanation. You amaze me, you amaze me.
I thought you were a quiet, dependable person, and now all at once you seem bent on making a
disgraceful exhibition of yourself. The chief did hint to me early this morning a possible explanation
for your disappearancewith reference to the cash payments that were entrusted to you recently
but I almost pledged my solemn word of honor that this could not be so. But now that I see how
incredibly obstinate you are, I no longer have the slightest desire to take your part at all. And your
position in the firm is not so unassailable. I came with the intention of telling you all this in private,
but since you are wasting my time so needlessly I don't see why your parents shouldn't hear it too.
For some time past your work has been most unsatisfactory; this is not the season of the year for a
business boom, of course, we admit that, but a season of the year for doing no business at all, that
does not exist, Mr. Samsa, must not exist."
"But, sir," cried Gregor, beside himself and in his agitation forgetting everything else, "I'm just going
to open the door this very minute. A slight illness, an attack of giddiness, has kept me from getting
up. I'm still lying in bed. But I feel all right again. I'm getting out of bed now. Just give me a moment
or two longer! I'm not quite so well as I thought. But I'm all right, really. How a thing like that can
suddenly strike one down! Only last night I was quite well my parents can tell you, or rather I did
have a slight presentiment. I must have showed some sign of it. Why didn't I report it at the office!
But one always thinks that an indisposition can be got over without staying in the house. Oh sir, do


spare my parents! All that you're reproaching me with now has no foundation; no one has ever said
a word to me about it. Perhaps you haven't looked at the last orders I sent in. Anyhow, I can still
catch the eight o'clock train, I'm much the better for my few hours' rest. Don't let me detain you
here, sir; I'll be attending to business very soon, and do be good enough to tell the chief so and to
make my excuses to him!"
And while all this was tumbling out pell-mell and Gregor hardly knew what he was saying, he had
reached the chest quite easily, perhaps because of the practice he had had in bed, and was now trying
to lever himself upright by means of it. He meant actually to open the door, actually to show himself
and speak to the chief clerk; he was eager to find out what the others, after all their insistence, would
say at the sight of him. If they were horrified then the responsibility was no longer his and he could
stay quiet. But if they took it calmly, then he had no reason either to be upset, and could really get to
the station for the eight o'clock train if he hurried. At first he slipped down a few times from the
polished surface of the chest, but at length with a last heave he stood upright; he paid no more
attention to the pains in the lower part of his body, however they smarted. Then he let himself fall
against the back of a near-by chair, and clung with his little legs to the edges of it. That brought him
into control of himself again and he stopped speaking, for now he could listen to what the chief
clerk was saying.
"Did you understand a word of it?" the chief clerk was asking; "surely he can't be trying to make
fools of us?" "Oh dear," cried his mother, in tears, "perhaps he's terribly ill and we're tormenting
him. Grete! Grete!" she called out then. "Yes Mother?" called his sister from the other side. They
were calling to each other across Gregor's room. "You must g.o this minute for the doctor. Gregor
is ill. Go for the doctor, quick. Did you hear how he was speaking?" "That was no human voice,"
said the chief clerk in a voice noticeably low beside the shrillness of the mother's. "Anna! Anna!" his
father was calling through the hall to the kitchen, clapping his hands, "get a locksmith at once!" And
the two girls were already running through the hall with a swish of skirtshow could his sister have
got dressed so quickly?and were tearing the front door open. There was no sound of its closing
again; they had evidently left it open, as one does in houses where some great misfortune has
happened.
But Gregor was now much calmer. The words he uttered were no longer understandable,
apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him, even clearer than before, perhaps because his
ear had grown accustomed to the sound of them. Yet at any rate people now believed that
something was wrong with him, and were ready to help him. The positive certainty with which these
first measures had been taken comforted him. He felt himself drawn once more into the human
circle and hoped for great and remarkable results from both the doctor and the locksmith, without
really distinguishing precisely between them. To make his voice as clear as possible for the decisive
conversation that was now imminent he coughed a little, as quietly as he could, of course, since this
noise too might not sound like a human cough for all he was able to judge. In the next room
meanwhile there was complete silence. Perhaps his parents were sitting at the table with the chief
clerk, whispering, perhaps they were all leaning against the door and listening.
Slowly Gregor pushed the chair towards the door, then let go of it, caught hold of the door for
supportthe soles at the end of his little legs were somewhat stickyand rested against it for a
moment after his efforts. Then he set himself to turning the key in the lock with his mouth. It
seemed, unhappily, that he hadn't really any teethwhat could he grip the key with?but on the
other hand his jaws were certainly very strong; with their help he did manage to set the key in


motion, heedless of the fact that he was undoubtedly damaging them somewhere, since a brown
fluid issued from his mouth, flowed over the key and dripped on the floor. "Just listen to that," said
the chief clerk next door; "he's turning the key." That was a great encouragement to Gregor; but
they should all have shouted encouragement to him, his father and mother too: "Go on, Gregor,"
they should have called out, "keep going, hold on to that key!" And in the belief that they were all
following his efforts intently, he clenched his jaws recklessly on the key with all the force at his
command. As the turning of the key progressed he circled round the lock, holding on now only with
his mouth, pushing on the key, as required, or pulling it down again with all the weight of his body.
The louder click of the finally yielding lock literally quickened Gregor. With a deep breath of relief
he said to himself: "So I didn't need the locksmith," and laid his head on the handle to open the
door wide.
Since he had to pull the door towards him, he was still invisible when it was really wide open. He
had to edge himself slowly round the near half of the double door, and to do it very carefully if he
was not to fall plump upon his back just on the threshold. He was still carrying out this difficult
manoeuvre, with no time to observe anything else, when he heard the chief clerk utter a loud
"Oh!"it sounded like a gust of windand now he could see the man, standing as he was nearest
to the door, clapping one hand before his open mouth and slowly backing away as if driven by some
invisible steady pressure. His motherin spite of the chief clerk's being there her hair was still
undone and sticking up in all directionsfirst clasped her hands and looked at his father, then took
two steps towards Gregor and fell on the floor among her outspread skirts, her face quite hidden on
her breast. His father knotted his fist with a fierce expression on his face as if he meant to knock
Gregor back into his room, then looked uncertainly round the living room, covered his eyes with his
hands and wept till his great chest heaved.
Gregor did not go now into the living room, but leaned against the inside of the firmly shut wing of
the door, so that only half his body was visible and his head above it bending sideways to look at the
others. The light had meanwhile strengthened; on the other side of the street one could see clearly a
section of the endlessly long, dark gray building oppositeit was a hospitalabruptly punctuated
by its row of regular windows; the rain was still falling, but only in large singly discernible and
literally singly splashing drops. The breakfast dishes were set out on the table lavishly, for. breakfast
was the most important meal of the day to Gregor's father, who lingered it out for hours over
various newspapers. Right opposite Gregor on the wall hung a photograph of himself on military
service, as a lieutenant, hand on sword, a carefree smile on his face, inviting one to respect his
uniform and military bearing. The door leading to the hall was open, and one could see that the
front door stood open too, showing the landing beyond and the beginning of the stairs going down.
"Well," said Gregor, knowing perfectly that he was the only one who had retained any composure,
"I'll put my clothes on at once, pack up my samples and start off. Will you only let me go? You see,
sir, I'm not obstinate, and I'm willing to work; traveling is a hard life, but I couldn't live without it.
Where are you going, sir? To the office? Yes? Will you give a true account of all this? One can be
temporarily incapacitated, but that's just the moment for remembering former services and bearing
in mind that later on, when the incapacity has been got over, one will certainly work with all the
more industry and concentration. I'm loyally bound to serve the chief, you know that very well.
Besides, I have to provide for my parents and my sister. I'm in great difficulties, but I'll get out of
them again. Don't make things any worse for me than they are. Stand up for me in the firm.
Travelers are not popular there, I know. People think they earn sacks of money and just have a good


time. A prejudice there's no particular reason for revising. But you, sir, have a more comprehensive
view of affairs than the rest of the staff, yes, let me tell you in confidence, a more comprehensive
view than the chief himself, who, being the owner, lets his judgment easily be swayed against one of
his employees. And you know very well that the traveler, who is never seen in the office almost the
whole year round, can so easily fall a victim to gossip and ill luck and unfounded complaints, which
he mostly knows nothing about, except when he comes back exhausted from his rounds, and only
then suffers in person from their evil consequences, which he can no longer trace back to the
original causes. Sir, sir, don't go away without a word to me to show that you think me in the right at
least to some extent!"
But at Gregor's very first words the chief clerk had already backed away and only stared at him with
parted lips over one twitching shoulder. And while Gregor was speaking he did not stand still one
moment but stole away towards the door, without taking his eyes off Gregor, yet only an inch at a
time, as if obeying some secret injunction to leave the room. He was already at the hall, and the
suddenness with which he took his last step out of the living room would have made one believe he
had burned the sole of his foot. Once in the hall he stretched his right arm before him towards the
staircase, as if some supernatural power were waiting there to deliver him.
Gregor perceived that the chief clerk must on no account be allowed to go away in this frame of
mind if his position in the firm were not to be endangered to the utmost. His parents did not
understand this so well; they had convinced themselves in the course of years that Gregor was
settled for life in this firm, and besides they were so preoccupied with their immediate troubles that
all foresight had forsaken them. Yet Gregor had this foresight. The chief clerk must be detained,
soothed, persuaded and finally won over; the whole future of Gregor and his family depended on it!
If only his sister had been there! She was intelligent; she had begun to cry while Gregor was still
lying quietly on his back. And no doubt the chief clerk so partial to ladies, would have been guided
by her; she would have shut the door of the flat and in the hall talked him out of his horror. But she
was not there, and Gregor would have to handle the situation himself. And without remembering
that he was still unaware what powers of movement he possessed, without even remembering that
his words in all possibility, indeed in all likelihood, would again be unintelligible, he let go the wing
of the door, pushed himself through the opening, started to walk towards the chief clerk, who was
already ridiculously clinging with both hands to the railing on the landing; but immediately, as he was
feeling for a support, he fell down with a little cry upon all his numerous legs. Hardly was he down
when he experienced for the first time this morning a sense of physical comfort; his legs had firm
ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy; they even strove to carry
him forward in whatever direction he chose; and he was inclined to believe that a final relief from all
his sufferings was at hand. But in the same moment as he found himself on the floor, rocking with
suppressed eagerness to move, not far from his mother, indeed just in front of her, she, who had
seemed so completely crushed, sprang all at once to her feet, her arms and fingers outspread, cried:
"Help, for God's sake, help!" bent her head down as if to see Gregor better, yet on the contrary kept
backing senselessly away; had quite forgotten that the laden table stood behind her; sat upon it
hastily, as if in absence of mind, when she bumped into it; and seemed altogether unaware that the
big coffee pot beside her was upset and pouring coffee in a flood over the carpet.
"Mother, Mother," said Gregor in a low voice, and looked up at her. The chief clerk for the
moment, had quite slipped from his mind; instead, he could not resist snapping his jaws together at
the sight of the streaming coffee. That made his mother scream again, she fled from the table and


fell into the arms of his father, who hastened to catch her. But Gregor had now no time to spare for
his parents; the chief clerk was already on the stairs; with his chin on the banisters he was taking one
last backward look. Gregor made a spring, to be as sure as possible of overtaking him; the chief clerk
must have divined his intention, for he leaped down several steps and vanished; he was still yelling
"Ugh!" and it echoed through the whole staircase.
Unfortunately, the flight of the chief clerk seemed completely to upset Gregor's father, who had
remained relatively calm until now, for instead of running after the man himself, or at least not
hindering Gregor, in his pursuit, he seized in his right hand the walking stick which the chief clerk
had left behind on a chair, together with a hat and greatcoat, snatched in his left hand a large news
paper from the table and began stamping his feet and flourishing the stick and the newspaper to
drive Gregor back into his room. No entreaty of Gregor's availed, indeed no entreaty was even
understood, however humbly he bent his head his father only stamped on the floor the more loudly.
Behind his father his mother had torn open a window, despite the cold weather, and was leaning far
out of it with her face in her hands. A strong draught set in from the street to the staircase, the
window curtains blew in, the newspapers on the table fluttered, stray pages whisked over the floor.
Pitilessly Gregor's father drove him back, hissing and crying "Shoo!" like a savage. But Gregor was
quite unpracticed in walking backwards, it really was a slow business. If he only had a chance to turn
round he could get back to his room at once, but he was afraid of exasperating his father by the
slowness of such a rotation and at any moment the stick in his father's hand might hit him a fatal
blow on the back or on the head. In the end, however, nothing else was left for him to do since to
his horror he observed that in moving backwards he could not even control the direction he took;
and so, keeping an anxious eye on his father all the time over his shoulder, he began to turn round
as quickly as he could, which was in reality very slowly. Perhaps his father noted his good intentions,
for he did not interfere except every now and then to help him in the manoeuvre from a distance
with the point of the stick. If only he would have stopped making that unbearable hissing noise! It
made Gregor quite lose his head. He had turned almost completely round when the hissing noise so
distracted him that he even turned a little the wrong way again. But when at last his head was
fortunately right in front of the doorway, it appeared that his body was too broad simply to get
through the opening. His father, of course, in his present mood was far from thinking of such a
thing as opening the other half of the door, to let Gregor have enough space. He had merely the
fixed idea of driving Gregor back into his room as quickly as possible. He would never have suffered
Gregor to make the circumstantial preparations for standing up on end and perhaps slipping his way
through the door. Maybe he was now making more noise than ever to urge Gregor forward, as if no
obstacle impeded him; to Gregor, anyhow, the noise in his rear sounded no longer like the voice of
one single father; this was really no joke, and Gregor thrust himselfcome what mightinto the
doorway. One side of his body rose up, he was tilted at an angle in the doorway, his flank was quite
bruised, horrid blotches stained the white door, soon he was stuck fast and, left to himself, could not
have moved at ale his legs on one side fluttered trembling in the air, those on the other were crushed
painfully to the floorwhen from behind his father gave him a strong push which was literally a
deliverance and he flew far into the room, bleeding freely. The door was slammed behind him with
the stick, and then at last there was silence.
II
Not until it was twilight did Gregor awake out of a deep sleep, more like a swoon than a sleep. He
would certainly have waked up of his own accord not much later, for he felt himself sufficiently


rested and well slept, but it seemed to him as if a fleeting step and a cautious shutting of the door
leading into the hall had aroused him. The electric lights in the street cast a pale sheen here and there
on the ceiling and the upper surfaces of the furniture, but down below, where he lay, it was dark.
Slowly, awkwardly trying out his feelers, which he now first learned to appreciate, he pushed his way
to the door to see what had been happening there. His left side felt like one single long, unpleasantly
tense scar, and he had actually to limp on his two rows of legs. One little leg, moreover, had been
severely damaged in the course of that morning's eventsit was almost a miracle that only one had
been damagedand trailed uselessly behind him.
He had reached the door before he discovered what had really drawn him to it: the smell of food.
For there stood a basin filled with fresh milk in which floated little sops of white bread. He could
almost have laughed with joy, since he was now still hungrier than in the morning, and he dipped his
head almost over the eyes straight into the milk. But soon in disappointment he withdrew it again;
not only did he find it difficult to feed because of his tender left sideand he could only feed with
the palpitating collaboration of his whole bodyhe did not like the milk either, although milk had
been his favorite drink and that was certainly why his sister had set it there for him, indeed it was
almost with repulsion that he turned away from the basin and crawled back to the middle of the
room.
He could see through the crack of the door that the gas was turned on in the living room, but while
usually at this time his father made a habit of reading the afternoon newspaper in a loud voice to his
mother and occasionally to his sister as well, not a sound was now to be heard. Well, perhaps his
father had recently given up this habit of reading aloud, which his sister had mentioned so often in
conversation and in her letters. But there was the same silence all around, although the flat was
certainly not empty of occupants. "What a quiet life our family has been leading," said Gregor to
himself, and as he sat there motionless staring into the darkness he felt great pride in the fact that he
had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat. But what if all the
quiet, the comfort, the contentment were now to end in horror? To keep himself from being lost in
such thoughts Gregor took refuge in movement and crawled up and down the room.
Once during the long evening one of the side doors was opened a little and quickly shut again, later
the other side door too; someone had apparently wanted to come in and then thought better of it.
Gregor now stationed himself immediately before the living room door, determined to persuade any
hesitating visitor to come in or at least to discover who it might be; but the door was not opened
again and he waited in vain. In the early morning, when the doors were locked, they had all wanted
to come in, now that he had opened one door and the other had apparently been opened during the
day, no one came in and even the keys were on the other side of the doors.
It was late at night before the gas went out in the living room, and Gregor could easily tell that his
parents and his sister had all stayed awake until then, for he could clearly hear the three of them
stealing away on tiptoe. No one was likely to visit him, not until the morning, that was certain; so he
had plenty of time to meditate at his leisure on how he was to arrange his life afresh. But the lofty,
empty room in which he had to lie flat on the floor filled him with an apprehension he could not
account for, since it had been his very own room for the past five yearsand with a half-
unconscious action, not without a slight feeling of shame, he scuttled under the sofa, where he felt
comfortable at once, although his back was a little cramped and he could not lift his head up, and his
only regret was that his body was too broad to get the whole of it under the sofa.


He stayed there all night, spending the time partly in a light slumber, from which his hunger kept
waking him up with a start, and partly in worrying and sketching vague hopes, which all led to the
same conclusion, that he must lie low for the present and, by exercising patience and the utmost
consideration, help the family to bear the inconvenience he was bound to cause them in his present
condition.
Very early in the morning, it was still almost night, Gregor had the chance to test the strength of his
new resolutions, for his sister, nearly fully dressed, opened the door from the hall and peered in. She
did not see him at once, yet when she caught sight of him under the sofawell, he had to be
somewhere, he couldn't have flown away, could he?she was so startled that without being able to
help it she slammed the door shut again. But as if regretting her behavior she opened the door again
immediately and came in on tiptoe, as if she were visiting an invalid or even a stranger. Gregor had
pushed his head forward to the very edge of the sofa and watched her. Would she notice that he had
left the milk standing, and not for lack of hunger, and would she bring in some other kind of food
more to his taste? If she did not do it of her own accord, he would rather starve than draw her
attention to the fact, although he felt a wild impulse to dart out from under the sofa, throw himself
at her feet and beg her for something to eat But his sister at once noticed, with surprise, that the
basin was still full, except for a little milk that had been spilt all around it, she lifted it immediately,
not with her bare hands, true, but with a cloth and carried it away. Gregor was wildly curious to
know what she would bring instead, and made various speculations about it. Yet what she actually
did next, in the goodness of her heart, he could never have guessed at. To find out what he liked she
brought him a whole selection of food, all set out on an old newspaper. There were old, half-
decayed vegetables, bones from last night's supper covered with a white sauce that had thickened;
some raisins and almonds; a piece of cheese that Gregor would have called uneatable two days ago; a
dry roll of bread, a buttered roll and a roll both buttered and salted. Besides all that, she set down
again the same basin, into which she had poured some water, and which was apparently to be
reserved for his exclusive use. And with fine tact, knowing that Gregor would not eat in her
presence, she withdrew quickly and even turned the key, to let him understand that he could take his
ease as much as he liked. Gregor's legs all whizzed towards the food. His wounds must have healed
completely, moreover, for he felt no disability, which amazed him and made him reflect how more
than a month ago he had cut one finger a little with a knife and had still suffered pain from the
wound only the day before yesterday. Am I less sensitive now? he thought, and sucked greedily at
the cheese, which above all the other edibles attracted him at once and strongly. One after another
and with tears of satisfaction in his eyes he quickly devoured the cheese, the vegetables and the
sauce; the fresh food, on the other hand, had no charms for him, he could not even stand the smell
of it and actually dragged away to some little distance the things he could eat. He had long finished
his meal and was only lying lazily on the same spot when his sister turned the key slowly as a sign for
him to retreat. That roused him at once, although he was nearly asleep, and he hurried under the
sofa again. But it took considerable self-control for him to stay under the sofa, even for the short
time his sister was in the room, since the large meal had swollen his body somewhat and he was so
cramped he could hardly breathe. Slight attacks of breathlessness afflicted him and his eyes were
starting a little out of his head as he watched his unsuspecting sister sweeping together with a broom
not only the remains of what he had eaten but even the things he had not touched, as if these were
now of no use to anyone, and hastily shoveling it all into a bucket, which she covered with a wooden
lid and carried away. Hardly had she turned her back when Gregor came from under the sofa and
stretched and puffed himself out.


In this manner Gregor was fed, once in the early morning while his parents and the servant girl were
still' asleep, and a second time after they had all had their midday dinner, for then his parents took a
short nap and the servant girl could be sent out on some errand or other by his sister. Not that they
would have wanted him to starve, of course, but perhaps they could not have borne to know more
about his feeding than from hearsay, perhaps too his sister wanted to spare them such little anxieties
wherever possible, since they had quite enough to bear as it was.
Under what pretext the doctor and the locksmith had been got rid of on that first morning Gregor
could not discover, for since what he said was not understood by the others it never struck any of
them, not even his sister, that he could understand what they said, and so whenever his sister came
into his room he had to content himself with hearing her utter only a sigh now and then and an
occasional appeal to the saints. Later on, when she had got a little used to the situationof course
she could never get completely used to itshe sometimes threw out a remark which was kindly
meant or could be so interpreted. "Well, he liked his dinner today," she would say when Gregor had
made a good clearance of his food; and when he had not eaten, which gradually happened more and
more often, she would say almost sadly: "Everything's been left standing again."
But although Gregor could get no news directly, he overheard a lot from the neighboring rooms,
and as soon as voices were audible, he would run to the door of the room concerned and press his
whole body against it. In the first few days especially there was no conversation that did not refer to
him somehow, even if only indirectly. For two whole days there were family consultations at every
mealtime about what should be done; but also between meals the same subject was discussed, for
there were always at least two members of the family at home, since no one wanted to be alone in
the flat and to leave it quite empty was unthinkable. And on the very first of these days the
household cookit was not quite clear what and how much she knew of the situationwent down
on her knees to his mother and begged leave to go, and when she departed, a quarter of an hour
later, gave thanks for her dismissal with tears in her eyes as if for the greatest benefit that could have
been conferred on her, and without any prompting swore a solemn oath that she would never say a
single word to anyone about what had happened.
Now Gregor's sister had to cook too, helping her mother; true, the cooking did not amount to
much, for they ate scarcely anything. Gregor was always hearing one of the family vainly urging
another to eat and getting no answer but: "Thanks, I've had all I want," or something similar.
Perhaps they drank nothing either. Time and again his sister kept asking his father if he wouldn't like
some beer and offered kindly to go and fetch it herself, and when he made no answer suggested that
she could ask the concierge to fetch it, so that he need feel no sense of obligation, but then a round
"No" came from his father and no more was said about it.
In the course of that very first day Gregor's father explained the family's financial position and
prospects to both his mother and his sister. Now and then he rose from the table to get some
voucher or memorandum out of the small safe he had rescued from the collapse of his business five
years earlier. One could hear him opening the complicated lock and rustling papers out and shutting
it again. This statement made by his father was the first cheerful information Gregor had heard since
his imprisonment. He had been of the opinion that nothing at all was left over from his father's
business, at least his father had never said anything to the contrary, and of course he had not asked
him directly. At that time Gregor's sole desire was to do his utmost to help the family to forget as
soon as possible the catastrophe which had overwhelmed the business and thrown them all into a
state of complete despair. And so he had set to work with unusual ardor and almost overnight had


become a commercial traveler instead of a little clerk, with of course much greater chances of
earning money, and his success was immediately translated into good round coin which he could lay
on the table for his amazed and happy family. These had been fine times, and they had never
recurred, at least not with the same sense of glory, although later on Gregor had earned so much
money that he was able to meet the expenses of the whole household and did so. They had simply
got used to it, both the family and Gregor; the money was gratefully accepted and gladly given, but
there was no special uprush of warm feeling. With his sister alone had he remained intimate, and it
was a secret plan of his that she, who loved music, unlike himself, and could play movingly on the
violin, should be sent next year to study at the Conservatorium, despite the great expense that would
entail, which must be made up in some other way. During his brief visits home the Conservatorium
was often mentioned in the talks he had with his sister, but always merely as a beautiful dream which
could never come true, and his parents discouraged even these innocent references to it; yet Gregor
had made up his mind firmly about it and meant to announce the fact with due solemnity on
Christmas Day.
Such were the thoughts, completely futile in his present condition, that went through his head as he
stood clinging upright to the door and listening. Sometimes out of sheer weariness he had to give up
listening and let his head fall negligently against the door, but he always had to pull himself together
again at once, for even the slight sound his head made was audible next door and brought all
conversation to a stop. "What can he be doing now?" his father would say after a while, obviously
turning towards the door, and only then would the interrupted conversation gradually be set going
again.
Gregor was now informed as amply as he could wishfor his father tended to repeat himself in his
explanations, partly because it was a long time since he had handled such matters and partly because
his mother could not always grasp things at oncethat a certain amount of investments, a very
small amount it was true, had survived the wreck of their fortunes and had even increased a little
because the dividends had not been touched meanwhile. And besides that, the money Gregor
brought home every monthhe had kept only a few dollars for himselfhad never been quite used
up and now amounted to a small capital sum. Behind the door Gregor nodded his head eagerly,
rejoiced at this evidence of unexpected thrift and foresight. True, he could really have paid off some
more of his father's debts to the chief with this extra money, and so brought much nearer the day on
which he could quit his job, but doubtless it was better the way his father had arranged it.
Yet this capital was by no means sufficient to let the family live on the interest of it; for one year,
perhaps, or at the most two, they could live on the principal, that was all. It was simply a sum that
ought not to be touched and should be kept for a rainy day; money for living expenses would have
to be earned. Now his father was still hale enough but an old man, and he had done no work for the
past five years and could not be expected to do much; during these five years, the first years of
leisure in his laborious though unsuccessful life, he had grown rather fat and become sluggish. And
Gregor's old mother, how was she to earn a living with her asthma, which troubled her even when
she walked through the flat and kept her lying on a sofa every other day panting for breath beside an
open window? And was his sister to earn her bread, she who was still a child of seventeen and
whose life hitherto had been so pleasant, consisting as it did in dressing herself nicely, sleeping long,
helping in the housekeeping, going out to a few modest entertainments and above all playing the
violin? At first whenever the need for earning money was mentioned Gregor let go his hold on the
door and threw himself down on the cool leather sofa beside it, he felt so hot with shame and grief.


Often he just lay there the long nights through with out sleeping at all, scrabbling for hours on the
leather. Or he nerved himself to the great effort of pushing an armchair to the window, then crawled
up over the window sill and, braced against the chair, leaned against the window panes, obviously in
some recollection of the sense of freedom that looking out of a window always used to give him.
For in reality day by day things that were even a little way off were growing dimmer to his sight; the
hospital across the street, which he used to execrate for being all too often before his eyes, was now
quite beyond his range of vision, and if he had not known that he lived in Charlotte Street, a quiet
street but still a city street, he might have believed that his window gave on a desert waste where
gray sky and gray land blended indistinguishably into each other. His quick-witted sister only needed
to observe twice that the armchair stood by the window; after that whenever she had tidied the
room she always pushed the chair back to the same place at the window and even left the inner
casements open.
If he could have spoken to her and thanked her for all she had to do for him, he could have borne
her ministrations better; as it was, they oppressed him. She certainly tried to make as light as possible
of whatever was disagreeable in her task, and as time went on she succeeded, of course, more and
more, but time brought more enlightenment to Gregor too. The very way she came in distressed
him. Hardly was she in the room when she rushed to the window, without even taking time to shut
the door, careful as she was usually to shield the sight of Gregor's room from the others, and as if
she were almost suffocating tore the casements open with hasty fingers, standing then in the open
draught for a while even in the bitterest cold and drawing deep breaths. This noisy scurry of hers
upset Gregor twice a day; he would crouch trembling under the sofa all the time, knowing quite well
that she would certainly have spared him such a disturbance had she found it at all possible to stay in
his presence without opening the window.
On one occasion, about a month after Gregor's metamorphosis, when there was surely no reason
for her to be still startled at his appearance, she came a little earlier than usual and found him gazing
out of the window, quite motionless, and thus well placed to look like a bogey. Gregor would not
have been surprised had she not come in at all, for she could not immediately open the window
while he was there, but not only did she retreat, she jumped back as if in alarm and banged the door
shut; a stranger might well have thought that he had been lying in wait for her there meaning to bite
her. Of course he hid himself under the sofa at once, but he had to wait until midday before she
came again, and she seemed more ill at ease than usual. This made him realize how repulsive the
sight of him still was to her, and that it was bound to go on being repulsive, and what an effort it
must cost her not to run away even from the sight of the small portion of his body that stuck out
from under the sofa. In order to spare her that, therefore, one day he carried a sheet on his back to
the sofait cost him four hours' laborand arranged it there in such a way as to hide him
completely, so that even if she were to bend down she could not see him. Had she considered the
sheet unnecessary, she would certainly have stripped it off the sofa again, for it was clear enough
that this curtaining and confining of himself was not likely to conduce to Gregor's comfort, but she
left it where it was, and Gregor even fancied that he caught a thankful glance from her eye when he
lifted the sheet carefully a very little with his head to see how she was taking the new arrangement.
For the first fortnight his parents could not bring themselves to the point of entering his room, and
he often heard them expressing their appreciation of his sister's activities, whereas formerly they had
frequently scolded her for being as they thought a somewhat useless daughter. But now, both of
them often waited outside the door, his father and his mother, while his sister tidied his room, and


as soon as she came out she had to tell them exactly how things were in the room, what Gregor had
eaten, how he had conducted himself this time and whether there was not perhaps some slight
improvement in his condition. His mother, moreover, began relatively soon to want to visit him, but
his father and sister dissuaded her at first with arguments which Gregor listened to very attentively
and altogether approved. Later, however, she had to be held back by main force, and when she cried
out: "Do let me in to Gregor, he is my unfortunate son! Can't you understand that I must go to
him?" Gregor thought that it might be well to have her come in, not every day, of course, but
perhaps once a week; she understood things, after all, much better than his sister, who was only a
child despite the efforts she was making and had perhaps taken on so difficult a task merely out of
childish thoughtlessness.
Gregor's desire to see his mother was soon fulfilled. During the daytime he did not want to show
himself at the window, out of consideration for his parents, but he could not crawl very far around
the few square yards of floor space he had, nor could he bear lying quietly at rest all during the night,
while he was fast losing any interest he had ever taken in food, so that for mere recreation he had
formed the habit of crawling crisscross over the walls and ceiling. He especially enjoyed hanging
suspended from the ceiling; it was much better than lying on the floor; one could breathe more
freely; one's body swung and rocked lightly; and in the almost blissful absorption induced by this
suspension it could happen to his own surprise that he let go and fell plump on the floor. Yet he
now had his body much better under control than formerly, and even such a big fall did him no
harm. His sister at once remarked the new distraction Gregor had found for himselfhe left traces
behind him of the sticky stuff on his soles wherever he crawledand she got the idea in her head of
giving him as wide a field as possible to crawl in and of removing the pieces of furniture that
hindered him, above all the chest of drawers and the writing desk. But that was more than she could
manage all by herself; she did not dare ask her father to help her; and as for the servant girl, a young
creature of sixteen who had had the courage to stay on after the cook's departure, she could not be
asked to help, for she had begged as an especial favor that she might keep the kitchen door locked
and open it only on a definite summons; so there was nothing left but to apply to her mother at an
hour when her father was out. And the old lady did come, with exclamations of joyful eagerness,
which, however, died away at the door of Gregor's room. Gregor's sister, of course, went in first, to
see that everything was in order before letting his mother enter. In great haste Gregor pulled the
sheet lower and tucked it more in folds so that it really looked as if it had been thrown accidentally
over the sofa. And this time he did not peer out from under it; he renounced the pleasure of seeing
his mother on this occasion and was only glad that she had come at ale "Come in, he's out of sight,"
said his sister, obviously leading her mother in by the hand. Gregor could now hear the two women
struggling to shift the heavy old chest from its place, and his sister claiming the greater part of the
labor for herself, without listening to the admonitions of her mother who feared she might
overstrain herself. It took a long time. After at least a quarter of an hour's tugging his mother
objected that the chest had better be left where it was, for in the first place it was too heavy and
could never be got out before his father came home, and standing in the middle of the room like
that it would only hamper Gregor's movements, while in the second place it was not at all certain
that removing the furniture would be doing a service to Gregor. She was inclined to think to the
contrary; the sight of the naked walls made her own heart heavy, and why shouldn't Gregor have the
same feeling, considering that he had been used to his furniture for so long and might feel forlorn
without it. "And doesn't it look," she concluded in a low voicein fact she had been almost
whispering all the time as if to avoid letting Gregor, whose exact whereabouts she did not know,


hear even the tones of her voice, for she was convinced that he could not understand her words
"doesn't it look as if we were showing him, by taking away his furniture, that we have given up hope
of his ever getting better and are just leaving him coldly to himself? I think it would be best to keep
his room exactly as it has always been, so that when he comes back to us he will find everything
unchanged and be able all the more easily to forget what has happened in between."
On hearing these words from his mother Gregor realized that the lack of all direct human speech
for the past two months together with the monotony of family life must have confused his mind,
otherwise he could not account for the fact that he had quite earnestly looked forward to having his
room emptied of furnishing. Did he really want his warm room, so comfortably fitted with old
family furniture, to be turned into a naked den in which he would certainly be able to crawl
unhampered in all directions but at the price of shedding simultaneously all recollection of his
human background? He had indeed been so near the brink of forgetfulness that only the voice of his
mother, which he had not heard for so long, had drawn him back from it. Nothing should be taken
out of his room; everything must stay as it was; he could not dispense with the good influence of the
furniture on his state of mind; and even if the furniture did hamper him in his senseless crawling
round and round, that was no drawback but a great advantage.
Unfortunately his sister was of the contrary opinion; she had grown accustomed, and not without
reason, to consider herself an expert in Gregor's affairs as against her parents, and so her mother's
advice was now enough to make her determined on the removal not only of the chest and the
writing desk, which had been her first intention, but of all the furniture except the indispensable
sofa. This determination was not, of course, merely the outcome of childish recalcitrance and of the
self-confidence she had recently developed so unexpectedly and at such cost; she had in fact
perceived that Gregor needed a lot of space to crawl about in, while on the other hand he never
used the furniture at all, so far as could be seen. Another factor might have been also the
enthusiastic temperament of an adolescent girl, which seeks to indulge itself on every opportunity
and which now tempted Grete to exaggerate the horror of her brother's circumstances in order that
she might do all the more for him. In a room where Gregor forded it all alone over empty walls no
one save herself was likely ever to set foot.
And so she was not to be moved from her resolve by her mother, who seemed moreover to be ill at
ease in Gregor's room and therefore unsure of herself, was soon reduced to silence and helped her
daughter as best she could to push the chest outside. Now, Gregor could do without the chest, if
need be, but the writing desk he must retain. As soon as the two women had got the chest out of his
room, groaning as they pushed it, Gregor stuck his head out from under the sofa to see how he
might intervene as kindly and cautiously as possible. But as bad luck would have it, his mother was
the first to return, leaving Grete clasping the chest in the room next door where she was trying to
shift it all by herself, without of course moving it from the spot. His mother however was not
accustomed to the sight of him, it might sicken her and so in alarm Gregor backed quickly to the
other end of the sofa, yet could not prevent the sheet from swaying a little in front. That was
enough to put her on the alert. She paused, stood still for a moment and then went back to Grete.
Although Gregor kept reassuring himself that nothing out of the way was happening, but only a few
bits of furniture were being changed round, he soon had to admit that all this trotting to and fro of
the two women, their little ejaculations and the scraping of furniture along the floor affected him
like a vast disturbance coming from all sides at once, and however much he tucked in his head and
legs and cowered to the very floor he was bound to confess that he would not be able to stand it for


long. They were clearing his room out; taking away everything he loved; the chest in which he kept
his fret saw and other tools was already dragged off; they were now loosening the writing desk
which had almost sunk into the floor, the desk at which he had done all his homework when he was
at the commercial academy, at the grammar school before that, and, yes, even at the primary
schoolhe had no more time to waste in weighing the good intentions of the two women, whose
existence he had by now almost forgotten, for they were so exhausted that they were laboring in
silence and nothing could be heard but the heavy scuffling of their feet.
And so he rushed outthe women were just leaning against the writing desk in the next room to
give themselves a breatherand four times changed his direction, since he really did not know what
to rescue first, then on the wall opposite, which was already otherwise cleared, he was struck by the
picture of the lady muffled in so much fur and quickly crawled up to it and pressed himself to the
glass, which was a good surface to hold on to and comforted his hot belly. This picture at least,
which was entirely hidden beneath him, was going to be removed by nobody. He turned his head
towards the door of the living room so as to observe the women when they came back.
They had not allowed themselves much of a rest and were already coming; Grete had twined her
arm round her mother and was almost supporting her. "Well, what shall we take now? " said Grete,
looking round. Her eyes met Gregor's from the wall. She kept her composure, presumably because
of her mother, bent her head down to her mother, to keep her from looking up, and said, although
in a fluttering, unpremeditated voice: "Come, hadn't we better go back to the living room for a
moment?" Her intentions were clear enough to Gregor, she wanted to bestow her mother in safety
and then chase him down from the wall. Well, just let her try it! He clung to his picture and would
not give it up. He would rather fly in Grete's face.
But Grete's words had succeeded in disquieting her mother, who took a step to one side, caught
sight of the huge brown mass on the flowered wallpaper, and before she was really conscious that
what she saw was Gregor screamed in a loud, hoarse voice: "Oh God, oh God!" fell with outspread
arms over the sofa as if giving up and did not move. "Gregor'" cried his sister, shaking her fist and
glaring at him. This was the first time she had directly addressed him since his metamorphosis. She
ran into the next room for some aromatic essence with which to rouse her mother from her fainting
fit. Gregor wanted to help toothere was still time to rescue the picturebut he was stuck fast to
the glass and had to tear himself loose; he then ran after his sister into the next room as if he could
advise her, as he used to do; but then had to stand helplessly behind her; she meanwhile searched
among various small bottles and when she turned round started in alarm at the sight of him; one
bottle fell on the floor and broke; a splinter of glass cut Gregor's face and some kind of corrosive
medicine splashed him; without pausing a moment longer Grete gathered up all the bottles she
could carry and ran to her mother with them; she banged the door shut with her foot. Gregor was
now cut off from his mother, who was perhaps nearly dying because of him; he dared not open the
door for fear of frightening away his sister, who had to stay with her mother; there was nothing he
could do but wait; and harassed by self-reproach and worry he began now to crawl to and fro, over
everything, walls, furniture and ceiling, and finally in his despair, when the whole room seemed to be
reeling round him, fell down on to the middle of the big table.
A little while elapsed, Gregor was still lying there feebly and all around was quiet, perhaps that was a
good omen. Then the doorbell rang. The servant girl was of course locked in her kitchen, and Grete
would have to open the door. It was his father. "What's been happening?" were his first words;
Grete's face must have told him everything. Grete answered in a muffled voice, apparently hiding


her head on his breast: "Mother has been fainting, but she's better now. Gregor's broken loose."
"Just what I expected," said his father, "just what I've been telling you, but you women would never
listen." It was clear to Gregor that his father had taken the worst interpretation of Grete's all too
brief statement and was assuming that Gregor had been guilty of some violent act. Therefore
Gregor must now try to propitiate his father, since he had neither time nor means for an
explanation. And so he fled to the door of his own room and crouched against it, to let his father
see as soon as he came in from the hall that his son had the good intention of getting back into his
room immediately and that it was not necessary to drive him there, but that if only the door were
opened he would disappear at once.
Yet his father was not in the mood to perceive such fine distinctions. "Ah!" he cried as soon as he
appeared, in a tone which sounded at once angry and exultant. Gregor drew his head back from the
door and lifted it to look at his father. Truly, this was not the father he had imagined to himself;
admittedly he had been too absorbed of late in his new recreation of crawling over the ceiling to take
the same interest as before in what was happening elsewhere in the flat, and he ought really to be
prepared for some changes. And yet, and yet, could that be his father? The man who used to lie
wearily sunk in bed whenever Gregor set out on a business journey; who welcomed him back of an
evening lying in a long chair in a dressing gown; who could not really rise to his feet but only lifted
his arms in greeting, and on the rare occasions when he did go out with his family, on one or two
Sundays a year and on high holidays, walked between Gregor and his mother, who were slow
walkers anyhow, even more slowly than they did, muffled in his old greatcoat, shuffling laboriously
forward with the help of his crook-handled stick which he set down most cautiously at every step
and, whenever he wanted to say anything, nearly always came to a full stop and gathered his escort
around him? Now he was standing there in fine shape; dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold
buttons, such as bank messengers wear; his strong double chin bulged over the stiff high collar of
his jacket; from under his bushy eyebrows his black eyes darted fresh and penetrating glances; his
onetime tangled white hair had been combed flat on either side of a shining and carefully exact
parting. He pitched his cap, which bore a gold monogram, probably the badge of some bank, in a
wide sweep across the whole room on to a sofa and with the tailends of his jacket thrown back, his
hands in his trouser pockets, advanced with a grim visage towards Gregor. Likely enough he did not
himself know what he meant to do; at any rate he lifted his feet uncommonly high, and Gregor was
dumbfounded at the enormous size of his shoe soles. But Gregor could not risk standing up to him,
aware as he had been from the very first day of his new life that his father believed only the severest
measures suitable for dealing with him. And so he ran before his father, stopping when he stopped
and scuttling forward again when his father made any kind of move. In this way they circled the
room several times without anything decisive happening, indeed the whole operation did not even
look like a pursuit because it was carried out so slowly. And so Gregor did not leave the floor, for he
feared that his father might take as a piece of peculiar wickedness any excursion of his over the walls
or the ceiling. All the same, he could not stay this course much longer, for while his father took one
step he had to carry out a whole series of movements. He was already beginning to feel breathless,
just as in his former life his lungs had not been very dependable. As he was staggering along, trying
to concentrate his energy on running, hardly keeping his eyes open; in his dazed state never even
thinking of any other escape than simply going forward; and having almost forgotten that the walls
were free to him, which in this room w-ere well provided with finely carved pieces of furniture full
of knobs and crevicessuddenly something lightly flung landed close behind him and rolled before
him. It was an apple; a second apple followed immediately; Gregor came to a stop in alarm; there


was no point in running on, for his father was determined to bombard him. He had filled his
pockets with fruit from the dish on the sideboard and was now shying apple after apple, without
taking particularly good aim for the moment. The small red apples rolled about the floor as if
magnetized and cannoned into each other. An apple thrown without much force grazed Gregor's
back and glanced off harmlessly. But another following immediately landed right on his back and
sank in; Gregor wanted to drag himself forward, as if this startling, incredible pain could be left
behind him; but he felt as if nailed to the spot and flattened himself out in a complete derangement
of all his senses. With his last conscious look he saw the door of his room being torn open and his
mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her underbodice, for her daughter had loosened
her clothing to let her breathe more freely and recover from her swoon, he saw his mother rushing
towards his father, leaving one after another behind her on the floor her loosened petticoats,
stumbling over her petticoats straight to his father and embracing him, in complete union with
himbut here Gregor's sight began to failwith her hands clasped round his father's neck as she
begged for her son's life.
III
The serious injury done to Gregor, which disabled him for more than a monththe apple went on
sticking in his body as a visible reminder, since no one ventured to remove itseemed to have made
even his father recollect that Gregor was a member of the family, despite his present unfortunate
and repulsive shape, and ought not to be treated as an enemy, that, on the contrary, family duty
required the suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but patience.
And although his injury had impaired, probably for ever, his powers of movement, and for the time
being it took him long, long minutes to creep across his room like an old invalidthere was no
question now of crawling up the wallyet in his own opinion he was sufficiently compensated for
this worsening of his condition by the fact that towards evening the living-room door, which he
used to watch intently for an hour or two beforehand, was always thrown open, so that lying in the
darkness of his room, invisible to the family, he could see them all at the lamp-lit table and listen to
their talk, by general consent as it were, very different from his earlier eavesdropping.
True, their intercourse lacked the lively character of former times, which he had always called to
mind with a certain wistfulness in the small hotel bedrooms where he had been wont to throw
himself down, tired out, on damp bedding. They were now mostly very silent. Soon after supper his
father would fall asleep in his armchair; his mother and sister would admonish each other to be
silent; his mother, bending low over the lamp, stitched at fine sewing for an underwear firm; his
sister, who had taken a job as a salesgirl, was learning shorthand and French in the evenings on the
chance of bettering herself. Sometimes his father woke up, and as if quite unaware that he had been
sleeping said to his mother: "What a lot of sewing you're doing today!" and at once fell asleep again,
while the two women exchanged a tired smile.
With a kind of mulishness his father persisted in keeping his uniform on even in the house; his
dressing gown hung uselessly on its peg and he slept fully dressed where he sat, as if he were ready
for service at any moment and even here only at the beck and call of his superior. As a result, his
uniform, which was not brand-new to start with, began to look dirty, despite all the loving care of
the mother and sister to keep it clean, and Gregor often spent whole evenings gazing at the many
greasy spots on the garment, gleaming with gold buttons always in a high state of polish, in which
the old man sat sleeping in extreme discomfort and yet quite peacefully.


As soon as the clock struck ten his mother tried to rouse his father with gentle words and to
persuade him after that to get into bed, for sitting there he could not have a proper sleep and that
was what he needed most, since he had to go on duty at six. But with the mulishness that had
obsessed him since he became a bank messenger he always insisted on staying longer at the table,
although he regularly fell asleep again and in the end only with the greatest trouble could be got out
of his armchair and into his bed. However insistently Gregor's mother and sister kept urging him
with gentle reminders, he would go on slowly shaking his head for a quarter of an hour, keeping his
eyes shut, and refuse to get to his feet. The mother plucked at his sleeve, whispering endearments in
his ear, the sister left her lessons to come to her mother's help, but Gregor's father was not to be
caught. He would only sink down deeper in his chair. Not until the two women hoisted him up by
the armpits did he open his eyes and look at them both, one after the other, usually with the remark:
"This is a life. This is the peace and quiet of my old age." And leaning on the two of them he would
heave himself up, with difficulty, as if he were a great burden to himself, suffer them to lead him as
far as the door and then wave them off and go on alone, while the mother abandoned her
needlework and the sister her pen in order to run after him and help him farther.
Who could find time, in this overworked and tired out family, to bother about Gregor more than
was absolutely needful? The household was reduced more and more; the servant girl was turned off;
a gigantic bony charwoman with white hair flying round her head came in morning and evening to
do the rough work; everything else was done by Gregor's mother, as well as great piles of sewing.
Even various family ornaments, which his mother and sister used to wear with pride at parties and
celebrations, had to be sold, as Gregor discovered of an evening from hearing them all discuss the
prices obtained. But what they lamented most was the fact that they could not leave the flat which
was much too big for their present circumstances, because they could not think of any way to shift
Gregor. Yet Gregor saw well enough that consideration for him was not the main difficulty
preventing the removal, for they could have easily shifted him in some suitable box with a few air
holes in it; what really kept them from moving into another flat was rather their own complete
hopelessness and the belief that they had been singled out for a misfortune such as had never
happened to any of their relations or acquaintances. They fulfilled to the uttermost all that the world
demands of poor people, the father fetched breakfast for the small clerks in the bank, the mother
devoted her energy to making underwear for strangers, the sister trotted to and fro behind the
counter at the behest of customers, but more than this they had not the strength to do. And the
wound in Gregor's back began to nag at him afresh when his mother and sister, after getting his
father into bed, came back again, left their work lying, drew close to each other and sat cheek by
cheek; when his mother, pointing towards his room, said: "Shut that door now, Grete," and he was
left again in darkness, while next door the women mingled their tears or perhaps sat dry-eyed staring
at the table.
Gregor hardly slept at all by night or by day. He was often haunted by the idea that next time the
door opened he would take the family's affairs in hand again just as he used to do; once more, after
this long interval, there appeared in his thoughts the figures of the chief and the chief clerk, the
commercial travelers and the apprentices, the porter who was so dull-witted, two or three friends in
other firms, a chambermaid in one of the rural hotels, a sweet and fleeting memory, a cashier in a
milliner's shop, whom he had wooed earnestly but too slowlythey all appeared, together with
strangers or people he had quite forgotten, but instead of helping him and his family they were one
and all unapproachable and he was glad when they vanished. At other times he would not be in the
mood to bother about his family, he was only filled with rage at the way they were neglecting him,


and although he had no clear idea of what he might care to eat he would make plans for getting into
the larder to take the food that was after all his due, even if he were not hungry. His sister no longer
took thought to bring him what might especially please him, but in the morning and at noon before
she went to business hurriedly pushed into his room with her foot any food that was available, and
in the evening cleared it out again with one sweep of the broom, heedless of whether it had been
merely tasted, oras most frequently happenedleft untouched. The cleaning of his room, which
she now did always in the evenings, could not have been more hastily done. Streaks of dirt stretched
along the walls, here and there lay balls of dust and filth. At first Gregor used to station himself in
some particularly filthy corner when his sister arrived, in order to reproach her with it, so to speak.
But he could have sat there for weeks without getting her to make any improvement; she could see
the dirt as well as he did, but she had simply made up her mind to leave it alone. And yet, with a
touchiness that was new to her, which seemed anyhow to have infected the whole family, she
jealously guarded her claim to be the sole caretaker of Gregor's room. His mother once subjected his
room to a thorough cleaning, which was achieved only by means of several buckets of waterall
this dampness of course upset Gregor too and he lay widespread, sulky and motionless on the
sofabut she was well punished for it. Hardly had his sister noticed the changed aspect of his room
that evening than she rushed in high dudgeon into the living room and, despite the imploringly
raised hands of her mother, burst into a storm of weeping, while her parentsher father had of
course been startled out of his chairlooked on at first in helpless amazement; then they too began
to go into action; the father reproached the mother on his right for not having left the cleaning of
Gregor's room to his sister; shrieked at the sister on his left that never again was she to be allowed
to clean Gregor's room; while the mother tried to pull the father into his bedroom, since he was
beyond himself with agitation; the sister, shaken with sobs, then beat upon the table with her small
fists; and Gregor hissed loudly with rage because not one of them thought of shutting the door to
spare him such a spectacle and so much noise.
Still, even if the sister, exhausted by her daily work, had grown tired of looking after Gregor as she
did formerly, there was no need for his mother's intervention or for Gregor's being neglected at all.
The charwoman was there. This old widow, whose strong bony frame had enabled her to survive
the worst a long life could offer, by no means recoiled from Gregor. Without being in the least
curious she had once by chance opened the door of his room and at the sight of Gregor, who, taken
by surprise, began to rush to and fro although no one was chasing him, merely stood there with her
arms folded. From that time she never failed to open his door a little for a moment, morning and
evening, to have a look at him. At first she even used to call him to her, with words which
apparently she took to be friendly, such as: "Come along, then, you old dung beetle!" or "Look at
the old dung beetle, then!" To such allocutions Gregor made no answer, but stayed motionless
where he was, as if the door had never been opened. Instead of being allowed to disturb him so
senselessly whenever the whim took her, she should rather have been ordered to clean out his room
daily, that charwoman! Once, early in the morningheavy rain was lashing on the windowpanes,
perhaps a sign that spring was on the wayGregor was so exasperated when she began addressing
him again that he ran at her, as if to attack her, although slowly and feebly enough. But the
charwoman instead of showing fright merely lifted high a chair that happened to be beside the door,
and as she stood there with her mouth wide open it was clear that she meant to shut it only when
she brought the chair down on Gregor's back. "So you're not coming any nearer?" she asked, as
Gregor turned away again, and quietly put the chair back into the corner.


Gregor was now eating hardly anything. Only when he happened to pass the food laid out for him
did he take a bit of something in his mouth as a pastime, kept it there for an hour at a time and
usually spat it out again. At first he thought it was chagrin over the state of his room that prevented
him from eating, yet he soon got used to the various changes in his room. It had become a habit in
the family to push into his room things there was no room for elsewhere, and there were plenty of
these now, since one of the rooms had been let to three lodgers. These serious gentlemenall three
of them with full beards, as Gregor once observed through a crack in the doorhad a passion for
order, not only in their own room but, since they were now members of the household, in all its
arrangements, especially in the kitchen. Superfluous, not to say dirty, objects they could not bear.
Besides, they had brought with them most of the furnishings they needed. For this reason many
things could be dispensed with that it was no use trying to sell but that should not be thrown away
either. All of them found their way into Gregor's room. The ash can likewise and the kitchen
garbage can. Anything that was not needed for the moment was simply flung into Gregor's room by
the charwoman, who did everything in a hurry; fortunately Gregor usually saw only the object,
whatever it was, and the hand that held it. Perhaps she intended to take the things away again as time
and opportunity offered, or to collect them until she could throw them all out in a heap, but in fact
they just lay wherever she happened to throw them, except when Gregor pushed his way through
the junk heap and shifted it somewhat, at first out of necessity, because he kind not room enough to
crawl, but later with increasing enjoy meet, although after such excursions, being sad and weary to
death, he would lie motionless for hours. And since the lodgers often ate their supper at home in the
common living room, the living-room door stayed shut many an evening, yet Gregor reconciled
himself quite easily to the shutting of the door, for often enough on evenings when it was opened he
had disregarded it entirely and lain in the darkest corner of his room, quite unnoticed by the family.
But on one occasion the charwoman left the door open a little and it stayed ajar even when the
lodgers came in for supper and the lamp was lit They set themselves at the top end of the table
where formerly Gregor and his father and mother had eaten their meals, unfolded their napkins and
took knife and fork in hand. At once his mother appeared in the other doorway with a dish of meat
and close behind her his sister with a dish of potatoes piled high. The food steamed with a thick
vapor. The lodgers bent over the food set before them as if to scrutinize it before eating, in fact the
man in the middle, who seemed to pass for an authority with the other two, cut a piece of meat as it
lay on the dish, obviously to discover if it were tender or should be sent back to the kitchen. He
showed satisfaction, and Gregor's mother and sister, who had been watching anxiously, breathed
freely and began to smile.
The family itself took its meals in the kitchen. None the less, Gregor's father came into the living
room before going into the kitchen and with one prolonged bow, cap in hand, made a round of the
table. The lodgers all stood up and murmured something in their beards. When they were alone
again they ate their food in almost complete silence. It seemed remarkable to Gregor that among the
various noises coming from the table he could always distinguish the sound of their masticating
teeth, as if this were a sign to Gregor that one needed teeth in order to eat, and that with toothless
jaws even of the finest make one could do nothing. "I'm hungry enough," said Gregor sadly to
himself, "but not for that kind of food. How these lodgers are stuffing themselves, and here am I
dying of starvation!"
On that very eveningduring the whole of his time there Gregor could not remember ever having
heard the violinthe sound of violin-playing came from the kitchen. The lodgers had already
finished their supper, the one in the middle had brought out a newspaper and given the other two a


page apiece, and now they were leaning back at ease reading and smoking. When the violin began to
play they pricked up their ears, got to their feet, and went on tiptoe to the hall door where they
stood huddled together. Their movements must have been heard in the kitchen, for Gregor's father
called out: "Is the violin-playing disturbing you, gentlemen? It can be stopped at once." "On the
contrary," said the middle lodger, "could not Fr&aulm;ulein Samsa come and play in this room,
beside us, where it is much more convenient and comfortable?" "Oh certainly," cried Gregor's
father, as if he were the violin-player. The lodgers came back into the living room and waited.
Presently Gregor's father arrived with the music stand, his mother carrying the music and his sister
with the violin. His sister quietly made everything ready to start playing; his parents, who had never
let rooms before and so had an exaggerated idea of the courtesy due to lodgers, did not venture to
sit down on their own chairs; his father leaned against the door, the right hand thrust between two
buttons of his livery coat, which was formally buttoned up; but his mother was offered a chair by
one of the lodgers and, since she left the chair just where he had happened to put it, sat down in a
corner to one side.
Gregor's sister began to play; the father and mother, from either side, intently watched the
movements of her hands. Gregor, attracted by the playing, ventured to move forward a little until
his head was actually inside the living room. He felt hardly any surprise at his growing lack of
consideration for the others; there had been a time when he prided himself on being considerate.
And yet just on this occasion he had more reason than ever to hide himself, since owing to the
amount of dust which lay thick in his room and rose into the air at the slightest movement, he too
was covered with dust; fluff and hair and remnants of food trailed with him, caught on his back and
along his sides; his indifference to everything was much too great for him to turn on his back and
scrape himself clean on the carpet, as once he had done several times a day. And in spite of his
condition, no shame deterred him from advancing a little over the spotless floor of the living room.
To be sure, no one was aware of him. The family was entirely absorbed in the violin-playing; the
lodgers, however, who first of all had stationed themselves, hands in pockets, much too close behind
the music stand so that they could all have read the music, which must have bothered his sister, had
soon retreated to the window, half-whispering with downbent heads, and stayed there while his
father turned an anxious eye on them. Indeed, they were making it more than obvious that they had
been disappointed in their expectation of hearing good or enjoyable violin-playing, that they had had
more than enough of the performance and only out of courtesy suffered a continued disturbance of
their peace. From the way they all kept blowing the smoke of their cigars high in the air through
nose and mouth one could divine their irritation. And yet Gregor's sister was playing so beautifully.
Her face leaned sideways, intently and sadly her eyes followed the notes of music. Gregor crawled a
little farther forward and lowered his head to the ground so that it might be possible for his eyes to
meet hers. Was he an animal, that music had such an effect upon him? He felt as if the way were
opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved. He was determined to push forward till
he reached his sister, to pull at her skirt and so let her know that she was to come into his room with
her violin, for no one here appreciated her playing as he would appreciate it. He would never let her
out of his room, at least, not so long as he lived; his frightful appearance would become, for the first
time, useful to him; he would watch all the doors of his room at once and spit at intruders; but his
sister should need no constraint, she should stay with him of her own free will; she should sit beside
him on the sofa, bend down her ear to him and hear him confide that he had had the firm intention
of sending her to the Conservatorium, and that, but for his mishap, last Christmassurely
Christmas was long past?he would have announced it to everybody without allowing a single


objection. After this confession his sister would be so touched that she would burst into tears, and
Gregor would then raise himself to her shoulder and kiss her on the neck, which, now that she went
to business, she kept free of any ribbon or collar.
"Mr. Samsa!" cried the middle lodger, to Gregor's father, and pointed, without wasting any more
words, at Gregor, now working himself slowly forwards. The violin fell silent, the middle lodger first
smiled to his friends with a shake of the head and then looked at Gregor again. Instead of driving
Gregor out, his father seemed to think it more needful to begin by soothing down the lodgers,
although they were not at all agitated and apparently found Gregor more entertaining than the
violin-playing. He hurried towards them and, spreading out his arms, tried to urge them back into
their own room and at the same time to block their view of Gregor. They now began to be really a
little angry, one could not tell whether because of the old man's behavior or because it had just
dawned on them that all unwittingly they had such a neighbor as Gregor next door. They demanded
explanations of his father, they waved their arms like him, tugged uneasily at their beards, and only
with reluctance backed towards their room. Meanwhile Gregor's sister, who stood there as if lost
when her playing was so abruptly broken off, came to life again, pulled herself together all at once
after standing for a while holding violin and bow in nervelessly hanging hands and staring at her
music, pushed her violin into the lap of her mother, who was still sitting in her chair fighting
asthmatically for breath, and ran into the lodgers' room to which they were now being shepherded
by her father rather more quickly than before. One could see the pillows and blankets on the beds
flying under her accustomed fingers and being laid in order. Before the lodgers had actually reached
their room she had finished making the beds and slipped out.
The old man seemed once more to be so possessed by his mulish self-assertiveness that he was
forgetting all, the respect he should show to his lodgers. He kept driving them on and driving them
on until in the very door of the bedroom the middle lodger stamped his foot loudly on the floor and
so brought him to a halt. "I beg to announce," said the lodger, lifting one hand and looking also at
Gregor's mother and sister, "that because of the disgusting conditions prevailing in this household
and family"here he spat on the floor with emphatic brevity"I give you notice on the spot.
Naturally I won't pay you a penny for the days I have lived here, on the contrary I shall consider
bringing an action for damages against you, based on claimsbelieve methat will be easily
susceptible of proof." He ceased and stared straight in front of him, as if he expected something. In
fact his two friends at once rushed into the breach with these words: "And we too give notice on the
spot." On that he seized the door-handle and shut the door with a slam.
Gregor's father, groping with his hands, staggered forward and fell into his chair; it looked as if he
were stretching himself there for his ordinary evening nap, but the marked jerkings of his head,
which was as if uncontrollable, showed that he was far from asleep. Gregor had simply stayed
quietly all the time on the spot where the lodgers had espied him. Disappointment at the failure of
his plan, perhaps also the weakness arising from extreme hunger, made it impossible for him to
move. He feared, with a fair degree of certainty, that at any moment the general tension would
discharge itself in a combined attack upon him, and he lay waiting. He did not react even to the
noise made by the violin as it fell off his mother's lap from under her trembling fingers and gave out
a resonant note.
"My dear parents," said his sister, slapping her hand on the table by way of introduction, "things
can't go on like this. Perhaps you don't realize that, but I do. I won't utter my brother's name in the
presence of this creature, and so all I say is: we must try to get rid of it. We've tried to look after it


and to put up with it as far as is humanly possible, and I don't think anyone could reproach us in the
slightest."
"She is more than right," said Gregor's father to himself. His mother, who was still choking for lack
of breath, began to cough hollowly into her hand with a wild look in her eyes.
His sister rushed over to her and held her forehead. His father's thoughts seemed to have lost their
vagueness at Grete's words, he sat more upright, fingering his service cap that lay among the plates
still lying on the table from the lodgers' supper, and from time to time looked at the still form of
Gregor.
"We must try to get rid of it," his sister now said explicitly to her father, since her mother was
coughing too much to hear a word, "it will be the death of both of you, I can see that coming. When
one has to work as hard as we do, all of us, one can't stand this continual torment at home on top of
it. At least I can't stand it any longer." And she burst into such a passion of sobbing that her tears
dropped on her mother's face, where she wiped them off mechanically.
"My dear," said the old man sympathetically, and with evident understanding, "but what can we do?"
Gregor's sister merely shrugged her shoulders to indicate the feeling of helplessness that had now
overmastered her during her weeping fit, in contrast to her former confidence.
"If he could understand us," said her father, half questioningly; Grete, still sobbing, vehemently
waved a hand to show how unthinkable that was.
"If he could understand us," repeated the old man, shutting his eyes to consider his daughter's
conviction that understanding was impossible, "then perhaps we might come to some agreement
with him. But as it is"
"He must go," cried Gregor's sister, "that's the only solution, Father. You must just try to get rid of
the idea that this is Gregor. The fact that we've believed it for so long is the root of all our trouble.
But how can it be Gregor? If this were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that human beings
can't live with such a creature, and he'd have gone away on his own accord. Then we wouldn't have
any brother, but we'd be able to go on living and keep his memory in honor. As it is, this creature
persecutes us, drives away our lodgers, obviously wants the whole apartment to himself and would
have us all sleep in the gutter. Just look, Father," she shrieked all at once, "he's at it again!" And in an
access of panic that was quite incomprehensible to Gregor she even quitted her mother, literally
thrusting the chair from her as if she would rather sacrifice her mother than stay so near to Gregor,
and rushed behind her father, who also rose up, being simply upset by her agitation, and half-spread
his arms out as if to protect her.
Yet Gregor had not the slightest intention of frightening anyone, far less his sister. He had only
begun to turn round in order to crawl back to his room, but it was certainly a startling operation to
watch, since because of his disabled condition he could not execute the difficult turning movements
except by lifting his head and then bracing it against the floor over and over again. He paused and
looked round. His good intentions seemed to have been recognized; the alarm had only been
momentary. Now they were all watching' him in melancholy silence. His mother lay in her chair, her
legs stiffly outstretched and pressed together, her eyes almost closing for sheer weariness; his father
and his sister were sitting beside each other, his sister's arm around the old man's neck.
Perhaps I can go on turning round now, thought Gregor, and began his labors again. He could not
stop himself from panting with the effort, and had to pause now and then to take breath. Nor did


anyone harass him, he was left entirely to himself. When he had completed the turn-round he began
at once to crawl straight back. He was amazed at the distance separating him from his room and
could not understand how in his weak state he had managed to accomplish the same journey so
recently, almost without remarking it. Intent on crawling as fast as possible, he barely noticed that
not a single word, not an ejaculation from his family, interfered with his progress. Only when he was
already in the doorway did he turn his head round, not completely, for his neck muscles were getting
stiff, but enough to see that nothing had changed behind him except that his sister had risen to her
feet. His last glance fell on his mother, who was not quite overcome by sleep.
Hardly was he well inside his room when the door was hastily pushed shut, bolted and locked. The
sudden noise in his rear startled him so much that his little legs gave beneath him. It was his sister
who had shown such haste. She had been standing ready waiting and had made a light spring
forward, Gregor had not even heard her coming, and she cried "At last!" to her parents as she
turned the key in the lock.
"And what now?" said Gregor to himself, looking round in the darkness. Soon he made the
discovery that he was now unable to stir a limb. This did not surprise him, rather it seemed
unnatural that he should ever actually have been able to move on these feeble little legs. Otherwise
he felt relatively comfortable. True, his whole body was aching, but it seemed that the pain was
gradually growing less and would finally pass away. The rotting apple in his back and the inflamed
area around it, all covered with soft dust, already hardly troubled him. He thought of his family with
tenderness and love. The decision that he must disappear was one that he held to even more
strongly than his sister, if that were possible. In this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he
remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning. The first broadening of light in the
world outside the window entered his consciousness once more. Then his head sank to the floor of
its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath.
When the charwoman arrived early in the morningwhat between her strength and her impatience
she slammed all the doors so loudly, never mind how often she had been begged not to do so, that
no one in the whole apartment could enjoy any quiet sleep after her arrivalshe noticed nothing
unusual as she took her customary peep into Gregor's room. She thought he was lying motionless
on purpose, pretending to be in the sulks; she credited him with every kind of intelligence. Since she
happened to have the long-handled broom in her hand she tried to tickle him up with it from the
doorway. When that too produced no reaction she felt provoked and poked at him a little harder,
and only when she had pushed him along the floor without meeting any resistance was her attention
aroused. It did not take her long to establish the truth of the matter, and her eyes widened, she let
out a whistle, yet did not waste much time over it but tore open the door of the Samsas' bedroom
and yelled into the darkness at the top of her voice: "Just look at this, it's dead; it's lying here dead
and done for!"
Mr. and Mrs. Samsa started up in their double bed and before they realized the nature of the
charwoman's announcement had some difficulty in overcoming the shock of it. But then they got
out of bed quickly, one on either side, Mr. Samsa throwing a blanket over his shoulders, Mrs. Samsa
in nothing but her nightgown; in this array they entered Gregor's room. Meanwhile the door of the
living room opened, too, where Grete had been sleeping since the advent of the lodgers; she was
completely dressed as if she had not been to bed, which seemed to be confirmed also by the
paleness of her face. "Dead? " said Mrs. Samsa, looking questioningly at the charwoman, although
she could have investigated for herself, and the fact was obvious enough without investigation. "I


should say so," said the charwoman, proving her words by pushing Gregor's corpse a long way to
one side with her broomstick. Mrs. Samsa made a movement as if to stop her, but checked it.
"Well," said Mr. Samsa, "now thanks be to God." He crossed himself, and the three women
followed his example. Grete, whose eyes never left the corpse, said: "lust see how thin he was. It's
such a long time since he's eaten anything. The food came out again just as it went in." Indeed,
Gregor's body was completely flat and dry, as could only now be seen when it was no longer
supported by the legs and nothing prevented one from looking closely at it.
"Come in beside us, Grete, for a little while," said Mrs. Samsa with a tremulous smile, and Grete, not
without looking back at the corpse, followed her parents into their bedroom. The charwoman shut
the door and opened the window wide. Although it was so early in the morning a certain softness
was perceptible in the fresh air. After all, it was already the end of March.
The three lodgers emerged from their room and were surprised to see no breakfast; they had been
forgotten. "Where's our breakfast?" said the middle lodger peevishly to the charwoman. But she put
her finger to her lips and hastily, without a word, indicated by gestures that they should go into
Gregor's room. They did so and stood, their hands in the pockets of their somewhat shabby coats,
around Gregor's corpse in the room where it was now fully light.
At that the door of the Samsas' bedroom opened and Mr. Samsa appeared in his uniform, his wife
on one arm, his daughter on the other. They all looked a little as if they had been crying; from time
to time Grete hid her face on her father's arm.
"Leave my house at once!" said Mr. Samsa, and pointed to the door without disengaging himself
from the women. "What do you mean by that?" said the middle lodger, taken somewhat aback, with
a feeble smile. The two others put their hands behind them and kept rubbing them together, as if in
gleeful expectation of a fine set-to in which they were bound to come off the winners. "I mean just
what I say," answered Mr. Samsa, and advanced in a straight line with his two companions towards
the lodger. He stood his ground at first quietly, looking at the floor as if his thoughts were taking a
new pattern in his head. "Then let us go, by all means," he said, and looked up at Mr. Samsa as if in a
sudden access of humility he were expecting some renewed sanction for this decision. Mr. Samsa
merely nodded briefly once or twice with meaning eyes. Upon that the lodger really did go with long
strides into the hall, his two friends had been listening and had quite stopped rubbing their hands for
some moments and now went scuttling after him as if afraid that Mr. Samsa might get into the hall
before them and cut them off from their leader. In the hall they all three took their hats from the
rack, their sticks from the umbrella stand, bowed in silence and quitted the apartment. With a
suspiciousness which proved quite unfounded Mr. Samsa and the two women followed them out to
the landing; leaning over the banister they watched the three figures slowly but surely going down
the long stairs, vanishing from sight at a certain turn of the staircase on every floor and coming into
view again after a moment or so; the more they dwindled, the more the Samsa family's interest in
them dwindled, and when a butcher's boy met them and passed them on the stairs coming up
proudly with a tray on his head, Mr. Samsa and the two women soon left the landing and as if a
burden had been lifted from them went back into their apartment.
They decided to spend this day in resting and going for a stroll; they had not only deserved such a
respite from work, but absolutely needed it. And so they sat down at the table and wrote three notes
of excuse, Mr. Samsa to his board of management, Mrs. Samas to her employer and Grete to the
head of her firm. While they were writing, the charwoman came in to say that she was going now,
since her morning's work was finished. At first they only nodded without looking up, but as she kept


hovering there they eyed her irritably. "Well?" said Mr. Samsa The charwoman stood grinning in the
doorway as if she had good news to impart to the family but meant not to say a word unless
properly questioned. The small ostrich feather standing upright on her hat, which had annoyed Mr.
Samsa ever since she was engaged, was waving gaily in all directions. "Well, what is it then?" asked
Mrs. Samsa, who obtained more respect from the charwoman than the others. "Oh," said the
charwoman, giggling so amiably that she could not at once continue, "just this, you don't need to
bother about how to get rid of the thing next door. It's been seen to already." Mrs. Samsa and Grete
bent over their letters again, as if preoccupied; Mr. Samsa, who perceived that she was eager to begin
describing it all in detail, stopped her with a decisive hand. But since she was not allowed to tell her
story, she remembered the great hurry she was in, being obviously deeply huffed: "Bye, everybody,"
she said, whirling off violently, and departed with a frightful slamming of doors.
"She'll be given notice tonight," said Mr. Samsa, but neither from his wife nor his daughter did he
get any answer, for the charwoman seemed to have shattered again the composure they had barely
achieved. They rose, went to the window and stayed there, clasping each other tight. Mr. Samsa
turned in his chair to look at them and quietly observed them for a little. Then he called out: "Come
along, now, do. Let bygones be bygones. And you might have some consideration for me." The two
of them complied at once, hastened to him, caressed him and quickly finished their letters.
Then they all three left the apartment together, which was more than they had done for months, and
went by tram into the open country outside the town. The tram, in which they were the only
passengers, was filled with warm sunshine. Leaning comfortably back in their seats they canvassed
their prospects for the future, and it appeared on closer inspection that these were not at all bad, for
the jobs they had got, which so far they had never really discussed with each other, were all three
admirable and likely to lead to better things later on. The greatest immediate improvement in their
condition would of course arise from moving to another house; they wanted to take a smaller and
cheaper but also better situated and more easily run apartment than the one they had, which Gregor
had selected. While they were thus conversing, it struck both Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, almost at the
same moment, as they became aware of their daughter's increasing vivacity, that in spite of all the
sorrow of recent times, which had made her cheeks pale, she had bloomed into a pretty girl with a
good figure. They grew quieter and half unconsciously exchanged glances of complete agreement,
having come to the conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her. And it
was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey
their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.
1915


The Lottery
by Shirley Jackson
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the
flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to
gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there
were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this
village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two
hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the
villagers to get home for noon dinner.
The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of
liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they
broke into boisterous play. and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and
reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon
followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and
Dickie Delacroix-- the villagers pronounced this name "Dellacroy"--eventually made a great pile of
stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood
aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at rolled in the dust or clung to the
hands of their older brothers or sisters.
Soon the men began to gather. surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors
and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were
quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters,
came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they
went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their
children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin
ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father
spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest
brother.
The lottery was conducted--as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program--by
Mr. Summers. who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial
man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him. because he had no children and
his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the black wooden box, there was a
murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he waved and called. "Little late today, folks." The
postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three- legged stool, and the stool was put in the
center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on it. The villagers kept their
distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool. and when Mr. Summers said, "Some of
you fellows want to give me a hand?" there was a hesitation before two men. Mr. Martin and his
oldest son, Baxter. came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up
the papers inside it.


The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on
the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr.
Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even
as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had
been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed
when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers
began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without
anything's being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely
black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded
or stained.
Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers
had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten
or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of
wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued. had been all
very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and
likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into he black
box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put
them in the box, and it was then taken to the safe of Mr. Summers' coal company and locked up
until Mr. Summers was ready to take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was
put way, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves's barn and
another year underfoot in the post office. and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery
and left there.
There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There
were the lists to make up--of heads of families. heads of households in each family. members of
each household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the
postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people remembered, there had been a
recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory. tuneless chant that had
been rattled off duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just
so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the people, but
years and years ago this p3rt of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual
salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to
draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the
official to speak to each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean
white shirt and blue jeans. with one hand resting carelessly on the black box. he seemed very proper
and important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.
Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs. Hutchinson
came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into
place in the back of the crowd. "Clean forgot what day it was," she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who
stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. "Thought my old man was out back stacking wood,"
Mrs. Hutchinson went on. "and then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I
remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running." She dried her hands on her apron, and
Mrs. Delacroix said, "You're in time, though. They're still talking away up there."


Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her husband and children
standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and began to make her
way through the crowd. The people separated good-humoredly to let her through: two or three
people said. in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd, "Here comes your, Missus,
Hutchinson," and "Bill, she made it after all." Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr.
Summers, who had been waiting, said cheerfully. "Thought we were going to have to get on without
you, Tessie." Mrs. Hutchinson said. grinning, "Wouldn't have me leave m'dishes in the sink, now,
would you. Joe?," and soft laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred back into position
after Mrs. Hutchinson's arrival.
"Well, now." Mr. Summers said soberly, "guess we better get started, get this over with, so's we can
go back to work. Anybody ain't here?"
"Dunbar." several people said. "Dunbar. Dunbar."
Mr. Summers consulted his list. "Clyde Dunbar." he said. "That's right. He's broke his leg, hasn't he?
Who's drawing for him?"
"Me. I guess," a woman said. and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. "Wife draws for her husband."
Mr. Summers said. "Don't you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?" Although Mr. Summers
and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of
the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr. Summers waited with an expression of polite interest
while Mrs. Dunbar answered.
"Horace's not but sixteen yet." Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. "Guess I gotta fill in for the old man
this year."
"Right." Mr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he asked, "Watson boy
drawing this year?"
A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. "Here," he said. "I m drawing for my mother and me." He
blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said things like "Good
fellow, lad." and "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it."
"Well," Mr. Summers said, "guess that's everyone. Old Man Warner make it?"
"Here," a voice said, and Mr. Summers nodded.
A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list. "All
ready?" he called. "Now, I'll read the names--heads of families first--and the men come up and take a
paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has
had a turn. Everything clear?"
The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions: most of them
were quiet. wetting their lips. not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand high and said,


"Adams." A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward. "Hi. Steve." Mr. Summers
said. and Mr. Adams said. "Hi. Joe." They grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then
Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner
as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd. where he stood a little apart from his
family. not looking down at his hand.
"Allen." Mr. Summers said. "Anderson.... Bentham."
"Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries any more." Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in
the back row.
"Seems like we got through with the last one only last week."
"Time sure goes fast.-- Mrs. Graves said.
"Clark.... Delacroix"
"There goes my old man." Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went forward.
"Dunbar," Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while one of the women
said. "Go on. Janey," and another said, "There she goes."
"We're next." Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the
box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all through the
crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hand. turning them over and
over nervously Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of
paper.
"Harburt.... Hutchinson."
"Get up there, Bill," Mrs. Hutchinson said. and the people near her laughed.
"Jones."
"They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that over in the north
village they're talking of giving up the lottery."
Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools," he said. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's
good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves,
nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be
heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always
been a lottery," he added petulantly. "Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with
everybody."
"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said.


"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."
"Martin." And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. "Overdyke.... Percy."
"I wish they'd hurry," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. "I wish they'd hurry."
"They're almost through," her son said.
"You get ready to run tell Dad," Mrs. Dunbar said.
Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and selected a slip from the
box. Then he called, "Warner."
"Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery," Old Man Warner said as he went through the crowd.
"Seventy-seventh time."
"Watson" The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said, "Don't be nervous, Jack,"
and Mr. Summers said, "Take your time, son."
"Zanini."
After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers. holding his slip of paper in
the air, said, "All right, fellows." For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips of paper were
opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saving. "Who is it?," "Who's got it?," "Is it
the Dunbars?," "Is it the Watsons?" Then the voices began to say, "It's Hutchinson. It's Bill," "Bill
Hutchinson's got it."
"Go tell your father," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.
People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring
down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly. Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. "You didn't
give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn't fair!"
"Be a good sport, Tessie." Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, "All of us took the same
chance."
"Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.
"Well, everyone," Mr. Summers said, "that was done pretty fast, and now we've got to be hurrying a
little more to get done in time." He consulted his next list. "Bill," he said, "you draw for the
Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?"
"There's Don and Eva," Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. "Make them take their chance!"


"Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr. Summers said gently. "You know that as
well as anyone else."
"It wasn't fair," Tessie said.
"I guess not, Joe." Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. "My daughter draws with her husband's family;
that's only fair. And I've got no other family except the kids."
"Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it's you," Mr. Summers said in explanation, "and
as far as drawing for households is concerned, that's you, too. Right?"
"Right," Bill Hutchinson said.
"How many kids, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked formally.
"Three," Bill Hutchinson said.
"There's Bill, Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me."
"All right, then," Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you got their tickets back?"
Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. "Put them in the box, then," Mr. Summers
directed. "Take Bill's and put it in."
"I think we ought to start over," Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. "I tell you it wasn't
fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that."
Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box. and he dropped all the papers but
those onto the ground. where the breeze caught them and lifted them off.
"Listen, everybody," Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.
"Ready, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked. and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his wife
and children. nodded.
"Remember," Mr. Summers said. "take the slips and keep them folded until each person has taken
one. Harry, you help little Dave." Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came willingly
with him up to the box. "Take a paper out of the box, Davy." Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand
into the box and laughed. "Take just one paper." Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you hold it for him."
Mr. Graves took the child's hand and removed the folded paper from the tight fist and held it while
little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.
"Nancy next," Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she
went forward switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box "Bill, Jr.," Mr. Summers said,
and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, near knocked the box over as he got a paper out.


"Tessie," Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly. and then set her
lips and went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.
"Bill," Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing his
hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.
The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, "I hope it's not Nancy," and the sound of the whisper
reached the edges of the crowd.
"It's not the way it used to be." Old Man Warner said clearly. "People ain't the way they used to be."
"All right," Mr. Summers said. "Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave's."
Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up
and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill. Jr.. opened theirs at the same time. and
both beamed and laughed. turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their
heads.
"Tessie," Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson,
and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.
"It's Tessie," Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. "Show us her paper. Bill."
Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black
spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal
company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.
"All right, folks." Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered
to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the
ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so
large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry
up."
Mr. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said. gasping for breath. "I can't run at all.
You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you."
The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out
desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the
head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of
the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.


"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.


Young Goodman Brown
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem Village; but put his head back
after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife
was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink
ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman Brown.

"Dearest heart," whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, "prithee
put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled
with such dreams and such thoughts that she's afeard of herself sometimes. Pray tarry with me this
night, dear husband, of all nights in the year."

"My love and my Faith," replied young Goodman Brown, "of all nights in the year, this one night
must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done
'twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, cost thou doubt me already, and we but three
months married?"

"Then God bless you!" said Faith, with the pink ribbons; "and may you find all well when you come
back."

"Amen!" cried Goodman Brown. "Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm
will come to thee."

So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to turn the corner by the
meeting-hduse, he looked back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy
air, in spite of her pink ribbons.

"Poor little Faith!" thought he, for his heart smote him. "What a wretch am I to leave her on such an
errand! She talks of dreams, too. Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream
had warned her what work is to be done to-night. But no, no; 't would kill her to think it. Well, she's
a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven."

With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more
haste on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of
the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately
behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the
traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs
overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.

"There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," said Goodman Brown to himself; and he
glanced fearfully behind him as he added, "What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!"

His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beheld the


figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman
Brown's approach and walked onward side by side with him. "You are late, Goodman Brown," said
he. "The clock of the Old South was striking as I came through Boston, and that is full fifteen
minutes agone."

"Faith kept me back a while," replied the young man, with a tremor in his voice, caused by the
sudden appearance of his companion, though not wholly unexpected.

It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it where these two were journeying.
As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveller was about fifty years old, apparently in the same
rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps
more in expression than features. Still they might have been taken for father and son. And yet,
though the elder person was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had an
indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would not have felt abashed at the governor's
dinner table or in King William's court, were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But
the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the
likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle
itself like a living serpent. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the
uncertain light.

"Come, Goodman Brown," cried his fellow-traveller, "this is a dull pace for the beginning of a
journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon weary."

"Friend," said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, "having kept covenant by meeting
thee here, It IS my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou
wot'st of."

"Sayest thou so?" replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. "Let us walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as
we go; and if I convince thee not thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the forest yet."

"Too far! too far!" exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his walk. "My father never went
into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest men
and good Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of the name of Brown that
ever took this path and kept--"

"Such company, thou wouldst say," observed the elder person, interpreting his pause. "Well said,
Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the
Puritans; and that's no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the
Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a
pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war. They
were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned
merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake."

"If it be as thou gayest," replied Goodman Brown, "I marvel they never spoke of these matters; or,
verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven them from New


England. We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness."

"Wickedness or not," said the traveller with the twisted staff, "I have a very general acquaintance
here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the
selectmen of divers towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court
are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too--But these are state secrets."

"Can this be so?" cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his undisturbed companion.
"Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their own ways, and are no
rule for a simple husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet the eye of
that good old man, our minister, at Salem Village? Oh, his voice would make me tremble both
Sabbath day and lecture day."

Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now burst into a fit of irrepressible
mirth, shaking himself so violently that his snakelike staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.

"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted he again and again; then composing himself, "Well, go on, Goodman Brown,
go on; but, prithee, don't kill me with laughing."

"Well, then, to end the matter at once," said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled, "there is my
wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my own."

"Nay, if that be the case," answered the other, "e'en go thy ways, Goodman Brown. I would not for
twenty old women like the one hobbling before us that Faith should come to any harm."

As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown
recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, and was
still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin. "A marvel, truly,
that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness at nightfall," said he. "But with your leave,
friend, I shall take a cut through the woods until we have left this Christian woman behind. Being a
stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and whither I was going."

"Be it so," said his fellow-traveller. "Betake you the woods' and let me keep the path."

Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his companion, who advanced
softly along the road until he had come within a staff's length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was
making the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some indistinct
words--a prayer, doubtless--as she went. The traveller put forth his staff and touched her withered
neck with what seemed the serpent's tail.

"The devil!" screamed the pious old lady.

"Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?" observed the traveller, confronting her and leaning on
his writhing stick.


"Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?" cried the good dame.

"Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the
silly fellow that now is. But--would your worship believe it?--my broomstick hath strangely
disappeared, stolen, as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all
anointed with the juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf's bane--"

"Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe," said the shape of old Goodman Brown.

"Ah, your worship knows the recipe," cried the old lady, cackling aloud. "So, as I was saying, being
all ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me
there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your good worship will
lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling."

"That can hardly be," answered her friend. "I may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse; but here is
my staff, if you will."

So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which
its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not
take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down again, beheld neither
Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but this fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly
as if nothing had happened.

"That old woman taught me my catechism," said the young man; and there was a world of meaning
in this simple comment.

They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his companion to make good
speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring up
in the bosom of his auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked: a branch of
maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of the twigs and little boughs, which were
wet with evening dew. The moment his fingers touched them they became strangely withered and
dried up as with a week's sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a
gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump of a tree and refused
to go any farther.

"Friend," said he, stubbornly, "my mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on this errand.
What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to
heaven: is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?"

"You will think better of this by and by," said his acquaintance, composedly. "Sit here and rest
yourself a while; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along."

Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as speedily out of sight as if
he had vanished into the deepening gloom. The young man sat a few moments by the roadside,
applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the minister in


his morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would
be his that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in
the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown heard the
tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the
forest, conscious of the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so happily turned
from it.

On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old voices, conversing soberly as
they drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the
young man's hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that particular spot,
neither the travellers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures brushed the small boughs by
the wayside, it could not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam from the
strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown alternately crouched and
stood on tiptoe, pulling aside the branches and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst without
discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could have sworn, were such a
thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging along
quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council. While yet
within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch.

"Of the two, reverend sir," said the voice like the deacon's, "I had rather miss an ordination dinner
than to-night's meeting. They tell me that some of our community are to be here from Falmouth
and beyond, and others from Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the Indian
powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best of us. Moreover, there
is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion."

"Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!" replied the solemn old tones of the minister. "Spur up, or we shall
be late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on the ground."

The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air, passed on through
the forest, where no church had ever been gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then,
could these holy men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman Brown
caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint and overburdened
with the heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a
heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars brightening in it.

"With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!" cried Goodman Brown.

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a
cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue
sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly
northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound
of voices. Once the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people of his
own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion table,
and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he
doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind.


Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine at Salem Village, but
never until now from a cloud of night. There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering
lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would
grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her
onward.

"Faith!" shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest
mocked him, crying, "Faith! Faith!" as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the
wilderness.

The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held his
breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices,
fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above
Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on the branch of
a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.

"My Faith is gone!" cried he, after one stupefied moment. "There is no good on earth; and sin is but
a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given."

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff
and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or
run. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him
in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to
evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of
wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and
sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he
was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him "Let us hear which will laugh
loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian
powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he
fear you."

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of
Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures,
now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter as set
all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is less
hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until,
quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of
a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of
midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of
what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the
tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meetinghouse. The verse died heavily away, and
was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness
pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his own ear


by its unison with the cry of the desert.

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity
of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural
resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame,
their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown
the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole
field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell' a numerous
congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of
the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.

"A grave and dark-clad company," quoth Goodman Brown.

In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor, appeared
faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath
after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the
holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there. At least there were
high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and
ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should
espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman
Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members of Salem Village famous for their especial
sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his
revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these
elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and
women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of
horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners
abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or
powwows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known
to English witchcraft.

"But where is Faith?" thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he trembled.

Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined to
words which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more.
Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung, and still the chorus
of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of a mighty organ; and with the final peal of that
dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts,
and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and according with the voice of
guilty man in homage to the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and
obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths above the impious
assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch
above its base, where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no slight
similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the New England churches.

"Bring forth the converts!" cried a voice that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest.


At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees and approached the
congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in
his heart. He could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to
advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair,
threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step,
nor to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his arms and
led him to the blazing rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led between
Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil's
promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the
canopy of fire.

"Welcome, my children," said the dark figure, "to the communion of your race. Ye have found thus
young your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!"

They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend worshippers were seen; the
smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.

"There," resumed the sable form, "are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them
holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness
and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night
it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have
whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for
widows' weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her
bosom how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers' wealth; and how fair damsels--
blush not, sweet ones--have dug little graves in the carder, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an
infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places--
whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest--where crime has been committed, and shall
exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall
be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and
which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power--than my power at its utmost--
can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon each other."

They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld his Faith, and
the wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar.

"Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its
despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race.
"Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are
ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my
children, to the communion of your race."

"Welcome," repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph.

And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of


wickedness in this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water,
reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did the shape of
evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that they might be
partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and
thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith
at him. What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at
what they disclosed and what they saw!

"Faith! Faith!" cried the husband, "look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one."

Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found himself amid calm night
and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which died heavily away through the forest. He
staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire,
besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.

The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem Village, staring
around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to
get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on
Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon
Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open
window. "What God cloth the wizard pray to?" quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that
excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a little girl who had
brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp
of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meetinghouse, he spied the head of Faith, with the
pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped
along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman Brown
looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad,
a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful
dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen
because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the
minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open
Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of
future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should
thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he
shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer,
he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he
had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and
children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no
hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.



The Notorious Jumping Frog
of Calaveras County
by Mark Twain

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-
natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as
requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley
is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked
old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work
and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should
be useless to me. If that was the design, it certainly suceeded.
I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the barroom stove of the old, dilapidated tavern in
the ancient mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an
expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up and
gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about
a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. SmileyRev. Leonidas W. Smiley, young
minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel's Camp. I added that,
if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many
obligations to him.
Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat me
down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he
never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned the initial
sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable
narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so
far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a
really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. I let him
go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once.
"Rev. Leonidas W. H'm, Reverend lewell, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley,
in the winter of '49or maybe it was the spring of '50I don't recollect exactly, somehow, though
what makes me think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume wasn't finished
when he first came to the camp; but anyway, he was the curiousest man about always betting on
anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he
couldn't, he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit himany way just so's he
got a bet, he was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner.
He was always ready and laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solit'ry thing mentioned but that
feller'd offer to bet on it, and take any side you please, as I was just telling you. If there was a horse
race, you'd find him flush, or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dogfight, he'd bet
on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there
was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp
meeting, he would be there reg'lar, to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter
about here, and so he was, too, and a good man. If he even seen a straddlebug start to go anywheres,


he would bet you how long it would take him to get wherever he was going to, and if you took him
up, he would foller that straddlebug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for
and how long he was on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell you about
him. Why, it never made no difference to himhe would bet on anythingthe dangdest feller.
Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to
save her; but one morning he come in, and Smiley asked how she was, and he said she was
considerable betterthank the Lord for his inf'nit mercyand coming on so smart that, with the
blessing of Prov'dence, she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, "Well, I'll risk two-
and-a-half that she don't, anyway."
Thish-yer Smiley had a marethe boys called her the fifteen-minute nag, but that was only in fun,
you know, because, of course, she was faster than thatand he used to win money on that horse,
for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or
something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards start, and then pass her
under way; but always at the fag end of the race she'd get excited and desperate-like, and come
cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and
sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust, and raising m-o-r-e
racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her noseand always fetch up at the stand just
about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.
And he had a little small bull pup, that to look at him you'd think he wan't worth a cent, but to set
around and look ornery, and lay for a chance to steal something. But as soon as money was up on
him, he was a different dog; his underjaw'd begin to stick out like the fo-castle of a steamboat, and
his teeth would uncover, and shine savage like the furnaces. And a dog might tackle him, and
bullyrag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew
Jacksonwhich was the name of the pupAndrew Jackson would never let on but what he was
satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing elseand the bets being doubled and doubled on the other
side all the time, till the money was all up; and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest
by the j'int of his hind leg and freeze to itnot chaw, you understand, but only jest grip and hang
on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till
he harnessed a dog once that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off by a circular
saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money was all up, and he come to
make a snatch for his pet holt, he saw in a minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other
dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter
discouraged-like, and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He give
Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was his fault for putting up a dog that
hadn't no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he
limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would
have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him, and he had geniusI know it,
because he hadn't had no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could
make such a fight as he could under them circumstances, if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me
feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out.
Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tomcats, and all them kind of things,
till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He
ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'klated to edercate him; and so he never
done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you


he did learn him too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog
whirling in the air like a doughnutsee him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a
good start, and come down flatfooted and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of
catching flies, and kept him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as far as he could
see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most anythingand I believe
him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this floorDan'l Webster was the name
of the frogand sing out, "Flies, Dan'l, flies!" and quicker'n you could wink, he'd spring straight up,
and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the floor again as solid as a gob of mud,
and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd
been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he
was, for all he was so gifted. And when it came to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could
get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead
level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on
him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for
fellers that had traveled and been everywheres, all said he laid over any frog that ever they see.
Well, Smiley kept the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him downtown sometimes and
lay for a bet. One day a fellera stranger in the camp, he wascome across him with his box, and
says:
"What might it be that you've got in the box?"
And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, "It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, maybe, but it
an'tit's only just a frog."
And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says,
"H'mso 'tis. Well, what's he good for?"
"Well," Smiley says, easy and careless, "he's good enough for one thing, I should judgehe can
outjump ary frog in Calaveras county."
The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and
says, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
"Maybe you don't," Smiley says. "Maybe you understand frogs, and maybe you don't understand
'em; maybe you've had experience, and maybe you an't only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got
my opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county."
And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I
an't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you."
And then Smiley says, "That's all rightthat's all rightif you'll hold my box a minute, I'll go and
get you a frog." And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's and
set down to wait.
So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized
his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shotfilled him pretty near up to
his chinand set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud
for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and
says:


"Now, if you're ready, set him alongside of Dan'l, with his fore-paws just even with Dan'l and I'll
give the word." Then he says, "onetwothreejump!" and him and the feller touched up the
frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off, but Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his
shoulderssolike a French-man, but it wan't no usehe couldn't budge; he was planted as solid
as an anvil, and he couldn't no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal
surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was, of course.
The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked
his thumb over his shouldersthis wayat Dan'l, and says again, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see
no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long time, and at last he says, "I do
wonder what in the nation that frog throw'd off forI wonder if there an't something the matter
with himhe 'pears to look might baggy, somehow." And he ketched Dan'l by the nap of the neck,
and lifted him up and says, "Why, blame my cats, if he don't weigh five pound!" and turned him
upside down, and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was
the maddest manhe set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketched him.
And
[Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was
wanted.] And turning to me as he moved away, he said: "Just set where you are, stranger, and rest
easyI an't going to be gone a second."
But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim
Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and
so I started away.
At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me and recommenced:
Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail, only jest a short stump like
a bannanner, and"
However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about the afflicted cow, but took
my leave.


The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian
College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept
them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he
would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips
of his fingers, and spend the last hour of fight pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips
into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps,
knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved
her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost
sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors
and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for
Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines .of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say,
Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces. They were signed "Love, Martha," but
Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he
sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly,
a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark
he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-
necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito
repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing
kits, Military payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these
items weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of
metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of
canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a
toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-size bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia.
Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village
of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that
weighed five pounds including the liner aid camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue
jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots-2.1 pounds
- and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution
against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope,
which for him was 2 necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RT0, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried
a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, Carried an illustrated New
Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's
distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land
was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered
flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you
could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet
band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each
carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent.
With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In


April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to
carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
They were called legs or grunts.
To carry something was to "hump" it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha
up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, "to hump," meant "to walk," or "to
march," but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.
Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of
Martha. The first was a Kodachrome snapshot signed "Love," though he knew better. She stood
against a brick wall. Her eyes were gray and neutral, her lips slightly open as she stared straight-on at
the camera. At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who had taken the picture, because he
knew she had boyfriends, because he loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of
the picture taker spreading out against the brick wall. The second photograph had been clipped from
the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook. It was an action shot-women's volleyball-and Martha was bent
horizontal to the floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the
expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore white gym shorts. Her legs,
he thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair, the left knee cocked and
carrying her entire weight, which was just over one hundred pounds. Lieutenant Cross remembered
touching that left knee. A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and
Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and
looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but he would always remember
the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee beneath it and the sound of the gunfire that killed Bonnie
and Clyde, how embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing her
goodnight at the dorm door. Right then, he thought, he should've done something brave. He
should've carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all
night long. He should've risked it. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new
things he should've done.

What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.
As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books,
binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe fight
and the responsibility for the lives of his men.
As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, twenty-six pounds with its battery.
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets
and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&M's for
especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly twenty pounds.
As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed twenty-
three pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded. In addition, Dobbins carried between
ten and fifteen pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders.
As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas-operated
assault rifle. The weapon weighed 75 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full twenty-round
magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the riflemen carried
anywhere from twelve to twenty magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4
pounds at minimum, fourteen pounds at maximum. When it was available, they also carried M-16
maintenance gear - rods and steel brushes and swabs and tubes of LSA oil - all of which weighed


about 2 pound. Among the grunts, some carried the M-79 grenade launcher, 5.9 pounds unloaded, a
reasonably fight weapon except for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round weighed ten
ounces. The typical load was twenty-five rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried thirty-
four rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional
burden, more than twenty pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and
water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear. He was dead
weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a
rock fall, or a big sandbag or something -just boom, then down - not like the movies where the dead
guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle -not like that, Kiowa said, the poor
bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April.
Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself. They stripped off Lavender's canteens and
ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat Kiley said the obvious, the guy's dead, and Mitchell Sanders
used his radio to report one U.S. KIA and to request a chopper. Then they wrapped Lavender in his
poncho. They carried him out to a dry paddy, established security, and sat smoking the dead man's
dope until the chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Martha's smooth young
face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was
dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her. When the dust-off
arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward they burned Than Khe. They marched until dusk,
then dug their holes, and that night Kiowa kept explaining how you had to be them how fast it was,
how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete, Boom-down, he said. Like cement.

In addition to the three standard weapons-the M-60, M-16, and M-79-they carried whatever
presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried
catch-as-catch can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14's and CAR-15's and
Swedish K's and grease guns and captured AK-47s and ChiCom's and RPG's and Simonov carbines
and black-market Uzi's and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAW's and shotguns
and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Strunk carried a slingshot;
a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his
grandfather's feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine-
3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades-fourteen ounces each.
They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade- twenty-four ounces. Some carried CS or
tear-gas grenades. Sonic carried white-phosphorus grenades. They carried all they could bear, and
then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck
charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble. An ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky-
white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying
letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land
touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-
together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast
pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a
token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what
'her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how


the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha
saw the pebble and, bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet,
with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare the toenails unpainted, the eyes
chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been
with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things
came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself.
He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in
his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind wandered. He had
difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the
column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending,
walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising.
Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.

What they carried varied by mission.
When a mission took them to the mountains, they carried mosquito netting, machetes, canvas tarps,
and extra bugjuice.
If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried
everything they could. In certain heavily mined AO's, where the land was dense with Toe Poppers
and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a twenty-eight-pound mine detector. With its
headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the lower back and shoulders,
awkward to handle, often useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway,
partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety.
On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took
along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight
vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a
problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight
scope, which weighed 63 pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his
girlfriend's panty hose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark
came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates,
where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting.
Other missions were more complicated and required special equipment. In mid-April, it was their
mission to search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of
Chu Lai. To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high explosives; four
blocks to a man, sixty-eight pounds in all. They carried wiring, detonators, and battery-powered
clackers. Dave Jensen carried earplugs. Most often, before blowing the tunnels, they were ordered by
higher command to search them, which was considered bad news, but by and large they just
shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a big man, Henry Dobbins was excused from
tunnel duty. The others would draw numbers. Before Lavender died there were seventeen men in
the platoon, and whoever drew the number seventeen would strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst
with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross's .45-caliber pistol. The rest of them would fan out as security.
They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining
cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there-the tunnel walls squeezing in-how the flashlight
seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense,
compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in-ass and elbows-a swallowed-up
feeling-and how you found yourself worrying about odd things-will your flashlight go dead? Do rats


carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would
they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse
than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.
On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number seventeen, he laughed and muttered something and
went down quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the
tunnel opening, then out across a dry paddy toward the village of Than Khe. Nothing moved. No
clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank Kool-Aid, not talking much,
feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also feeling the luck of the draw, You win some, you lose some,
said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line and no one
laughed.
Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to
pee. After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel, leaned down, and examined
the darkness. Trouble, he thought-a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, lie was
thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive
under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on
Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he
wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe- her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a
virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets-why poetry? Why so
sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone -riding her bike across
campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria. Even dancing, she danced alone - and it was the
aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded
and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her. She received the kiss without returning it, her
eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.
Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the
white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her
tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was; the sullen paddies, yet he
could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at
war, in love. He was twenty two years old. He couldn't help it.
A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel. He came up grinning, filthy but alive.
Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped Strunk on the back and made
jokes about rising from the dead.
Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave. Fuckin' zombie.
The men laughed. They all felt great relief.
Spook City, said Mitchell Sanders.
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and fight then, when
Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender
was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were
broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat
Kiley said, the guy's dead. The guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound -the guy's dead. I
mean really.

The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his
good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit's foot. Norman Bowker, other-wise a very gentle
person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders. The thumb


was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed four ounces at most. It had been cut from a VC
corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They'd found him at the bottom of an irrigation ditch, badly
burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy wore black shorts and sandals. At the time of his death
he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition.
You want my opinion, Mitchell Sanders said, there's a definite moral here.
He put his hand oil the dead boy's wrist. He was quiet for a time, as if counting a pulse, then he
patted the stomach, almost affectionately, and used Kiowa's hunting hatchet to remove the thumb.
Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was.
Moral?
You know- Moral.
Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to Norman Bowker. There was no
blood. Smiling, he kicked the boy's head, watched the files scatter, and said, It's like with that old TV
show - Paladin. Have gun, will travel.
Henry Dobbins thought about it.
Yeah, well, he finally said. I don't see no moral.
There it is, man.
Fuck off.

They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal
flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the
sniffing Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets,
bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried
hot chow in green Mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They
carried plastic water containers, each with a two gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of
starched tiger fatigues for special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave
Jensen carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Strunk carried
tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77
scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory.
They took up what others could no longer bear, Often, they carried each other, the wounded or
weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese English dictionaries,
insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.
They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and
leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself. Vietnam, the place,
the sod -a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the
sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and
decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night
they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without
purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly,
dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering
with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and
down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because
it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the
hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and
conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations


were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without
knowing what to look for, nor caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men,
blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the
next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives. The
pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak
jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often
discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow
their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive
with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of
ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters-the resources were stunning -sparklers for the
Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter. It was the great American war chest-the fruits of sciences,
the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops,
the vast fields of corn and wheat they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and
shoulders-and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least
the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than
Khe. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called
in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours through the hot
afternoon, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found
himself trembling.
He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed five pounds, he began digging a hole
in the earth.
He felt shame. He hated himself He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence
Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach
for the rest of the war.
All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate,
and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a
long while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself,
because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at
Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized
she did not love him and never would.

Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I swear to God - boom-down. Not a word.
I've heard this, said Norman Bowker.
A pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping.
All right, fine. That's enough.
Yeah, but you had to see it, the guy just
I heard, man. Cement. So why not shut the fuck up?
Kiowa shook his head sadly and glanced over at the hole where Lieutenant Jimmy Cross sat
watching the night. The air was thick and wet. A warm, dense fog had settled over the paddies and
there was the stillness that precedes rain.
After a time Kiowa sighed.


One thing for sure, he said. The lieutenant's in some deep hurt. I mean that crying jag - the way he
was carrying on - it wasn't fake or anything, it was real heavy-duty hurt. The man cares.
Sure, Norman Bowker said.
Say what you want, the man does care.
We all got problems.
Not Lavender.
No, I guess not, Bowker said. Do me a favor, though.
Shut up?
That's a smart Indian. Shut up.
Shrugging, Kiowa pulled off his boots. He wanted to say more, just to lighten up his sleep, but
instead he opened his New Testament and arranged it beneath his head as a pillow. The fog made
things seem hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but then he was
thinking how fast it was, no drama, down and dead, and how it was hard to feet anything except
surprise. It seemed unchristian. He wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the
emotion wasn't there and he couldn't make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be alive. He liked the
smell of the New Testament under his check, the leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the
chemicals were. He liked hearing the sounds of night. Even his fatigue, it felt fine, the stiff muscles
and the prickly awareness of his own body, a floating feeling. He enjoyed not being dead. Lying
there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's
pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think
was Boon-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in
around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.
After a moment Norman Bowker sat up in the dark.
What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell it to me.
Forget it.
No, man, go on. One thing I hate, it's a silent Indian.

For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however,
there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't. When they twitched
and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the
earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and
went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers,
hoping not to die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended,
they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it.
They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take
on the old logic-absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of
being alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups,
becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They would check for casualties,
call in dust-offs, light cigarettes, try to smile, clear their throats and spit and begin cleaning their
weapons. After a time someone would shake his head and say, No lie, I almost shit my pants, and
someone else would laugh, which meant it was bad, yes, but the guy had obviously not shit his pants,
it wasn't that bad, and in any case nobody would ever do such a thing and then go ahead and talk
about it. They would squint into the dense, oppressive sunlight. For a few moments, perhaps, they
would fall silent, lighting a joint and tracking its passage from man to man, inhaling, holding in the


humiliation. Scary stuff, one of them might say. But then someone else would grin or flick his
eyebrows and say, Roger-dodger, almost cut me a new asshole, almost.
There were numerous such poses. Some carried themselves with a sort of wistful resignation, others
with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but
they were even more afraid to show it.
They found jokes to tell.
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased, they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped
while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors and the war came at them in 3-D.
When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because
they had their fines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other
names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off
thumbs. They talked grunt lingo. They told stories about Ted Lavender's supply of tranquilizers,
how the poor guy didn't feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was.
There's a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders.
They were waiting for Lavender's chopper, smoking the dead man's dope.
The moral's pretty obvious, Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, they'll ruin
your day every time.
Cute, said Henry Dobbins.
Mind-blower, get it? Talk about wiggy- nothing left, just blood and brains.
They made themselves laugh.
There it is, they'd say, over and over, as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance
between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going. There it is, which meant be cool, let it ride,
because oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and
positively and fucking well is.
They were tough.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing -these
were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible
weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely
restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of
all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their
reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and
died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first
place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died
so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under
fire. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They kept
humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and
fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak
and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and
dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not
courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure. They sneered at
sick call. They spoke bitterly about guys who had found release by shooting off their own toes or
fingers. Pussies, they'd say. Candyasses. It was fierce, mocking talk, with only a trace of envy or awe,
but even so, the image played itself out behind their eyes.


They imagined the muzzle against flesh. They imagined the quick, sweet pain, then the evacuation to
Japan, then a hospital with warm beds and cute geisha nurses.
They dreamed of freedom birds.
At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo jets. They felt the rush of
takeoff Gone! they yelled. And then velocity, wings and engines, a smiling stewardess-but it was more
than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching.
They were flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight,
feeling the cold slap of wind and altitude, soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone! - they were naked. They
were light and free-it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in
the brain, a giddy bubbling in the lungs as they were taken up over the Clouds and the war, beyond
duty, beyond gravity and mortification anti global entanglements -Sin loi! They yelled, I'm sorry,
motherfuckers, but I'm out of it, I'm goofed, I'm on a space cruise, I'm gone! -and it was a restful,
disencumbered sensation, just riding the fight waves, sailing; that big silver freedom bird over the
mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and
highways and the Golden Arches of McDonald's. It was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling,
falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the
vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.
Gone! they screamed, I'm sorry but I'm gone! And so at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves
over to lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne.

On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of
his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs. There was a steady
rain falling, which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and Sterno to build a small fire, screening
it with his body, holding the photographs over the tight blue flame with the tips of his fingers.
He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just stupid.
Lavender was dead. You couldn't burn the blame.
Besides, the letters were in his head. And even now, without photographs, Lieutenant Cross could
see Martha playing volleyball in her white gym shorts and yellow T-shirt. He could see her moving in
the rain.
When the fire died out, Lieutenant Cross pulled his poncho over his shoulders and ate breakfast
from a can.
There was no great mystery, he decided.
In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy take care of
yourself. She wasn't involved. She signed the letters "Love," but it wasn't love, and all the fine lines
and technicalities did not matter.
The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything seemed part of everything else, the fog and
Martha and the deepening rain.
It was a war, after all.
Half smiling, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross took out his maps. He shook his head hard, as if to clear it,
then bent forward and began planning the day's march. In ten minutes, or maybe twenty, he would
rouse the men and they would pack up and head west, where the maps showed the country to be
green and inviting. They would do what they had always done. The rain might add some weight, but
otherwise it would be one more day layered upon all the other days.
He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach.


No more fantasies, he told himself.
Henceforth, when lie thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere.
He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where
there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of carelessness and
gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you were dead, never partly dead.
Briefly, in the rain, Lieutenant Cross saw Martha's gray eyes gazing back at him.
He understood.
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to
do.
He almost nodded at her, but didn't.
Instead he went back to his maps. He was now determined to perform his duties firmly and without
negligence. It wouldn't help Lavender, he knew that, but from this point on he would comport
himself as a soldier. He would dispose of his good-luck pebble. Swallow it, maybe, or use Lee
Strunk's slingshot, or just drop it along the trail. On the march he would impose strict field
discipline. He would be careful to send out flank security, to prevent straggling or bunching up, to
keep his troops moving at the proper pace and at the proper interval. He would insist on clean
weapons. He would confiscate the remainder of Lavender's dope. Later in the day, perhaps, he
would call the men together and speak to them plainly. He would accept the blame for what had
happened to Ted Lavender. He would be a man about it. He would look them in the eyes, keeping
his chin level, and he would issue the new SOPs in a calm, impersonal tone of voice, an officer's
voice, leaving no room for argument or discussion. Commencing immediately, he'd tell them, they
would no longer abandon equipment along the route of march. They would police up their acts.
They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working
order.
He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself.
Among the men there would be grumbling, of course, and maybe worse, because their days would
seem longer and their loads heavier, but Lieutenant Cross reminded himself that his obligation was
not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor. And if anyone
quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct
command posture. He might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He might just shrug and say
Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and move out toward the villages west
of Than Khe. (1986)

R&R rest and rehabilitation leave
SOP standard operating procedure
RTO radio and telephone operator
M&M joking term for medical supplies
KIA killed in action
AOs areas of operation
Sin loi Sorry
Note: The last Kodachrome processing plant closed in 2010. The slide film is no longer available.



Memento Mori
by Jonathan Nolan

"What like a bullet can undeceive!"
Herman Melville
Your wife always used to say you'd be late for your own funeral. Remember that? Her little joke because you were such
a slobalways late, always forgetting stuff, even before the incident.
Right about now you're probably wondering if you were late for hers.
You were there, you can be sure of that. That's what the picture's forthe one tacked to the wall by the door. It's not
customary to take pictures at a funeral, but somebody, your doctors, I guess, knew you wouldn't remember. They had it
blown up nice and big and stuck it right there, next to the door, so you couldn't help but see it every time you got up to
find out where she was.
The guy in the picture, the one with the flowers? That's you. And what are you doing? You're reading the headstone,
trying to figure out whose funeral you're at, same as you're reading it now, trying to figure why someone stuck that
picture next to your door. But why bother reading something that you won't remember?
She's gone, gone for good, and you must be hurting right now, hearing the news. Believe me, I know how you feel.
You're probably a wreck. But give it five minutes, maybe ten. Maybe you can even go a whole half hour before you
forget.
But you will forgetI guarantee it. A few more minutes and you'll be heading for the door, looking for her all over
again, breaking down when you find the picture. How many times do you have to hear the news before some other part
of your body, other than that busted brain of yours, starts to remember?
Never-ending grief, never-ending anger. Useless without direction. Maybe you can't understand what's happened. Can't
say I really understand, either. Backwards amnesia. That's what the sign says. CRS disease. Your guess is as good as
mine.
Maybe you can't understand what happened to you. But you do remember what happened to HER, don't you? The
doctors don't want to talk about it. They won't answer my questions. They don't think it's right for a man in your
condition to hear about those things. But you remember enough, don't you? You remember his face.
This is why I'm writing to you. Futile, maybe. I don't know how many times you'll have to read this before you listen
to me. I don't even know how long you've been locked up in this room already. Neither do you. But your advantage in
forgetting is that you'll forget to write yourself off as a lost cause.
Sooner or later you'll want to do something about it. And when you do, you'll just have to trust me, because I'm the
only one who can help you.

EARL OPENS ONE EYE after another to a stretch of white ceiling tiles interrupted by a hand-


printed sign taped right above his head, large enough for him to read from the bed. An alarm clock
is ringing somewhere. He reads the sign, blinks, reads it again, then takes a look at the room.
It's a white room, overwhelmingly white, from the walls and the curtains to the institutional
furniture and the bedspread. The alarm clock is ringing from the white desk under the window with
the white curtains. At this point Earl probably notices that he is lying on top of his white comforter.
He is already wearing a dressing gown and slippers.
He lies back and reads the sign taped to the ceiling again. It says, in crude block capitals, THIS IS
YOUR ROOM. THIS IS A ROOM IN A HOSPITAL. THIS IS WHERE YOU LIVE NOW.
Earl rises and takes a look around. The room is large for a hospitalempty linoleum stretches out
from the bed in three directions. Two doors and a window. The view isn't very helpful, eithera
close of trees in the center of a carefully manicured piece of turf that terminates in a sliver of two-
lane blacktop. The trees, except for the evergreens, are bareearly spring or late fall, one or the
other.
Every inch of the desk is covered with Post-it notes, legal pads, neatly printed lists, psychological
textbooks, framed pictures. On top of the mess is a half-completed crossword puzzle. The alarm
clock is riding a pile of folded newspapers. Earl slaps the snooze button and takes a cigarette from
the pack taped to the sleeve of his dressing gown. He pats the empty pockets of his pajamas for a
light. He rifles the papers on the desk, looks quickly through the drawers. Eventually he finds a box
of kitchen matches taped to the wall next to the window. Another sign is taped just above the box.
It says in loud yellow letters, CIGARETTE? CHECK FOR LIT ONES FIRST, STUPID.
Earl laughs at the sign, lights his cigarette, and takes a long draw. Taped to the window in front of
him is another piece of looseleaf paper headed YOUR SCHEDULE.
It charts off the hours, every hour, in blocks: 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. is labeled go BACK TO
SLEEP. Earl consults the alarm clock: 8:15. Given the light outside, it must be morning. He checks
his watch: 10:30. He presses the watch to his ear and listens. He gives the watch a wind or two and
sets it to match the alarm clock.
According to the schedule, the entire block from 8:00 to 8:30 has been labeled BRUSH YOUR
TEETH. Earl laughs again and walks over to the bathroom.
The bathroom window is open. As he flaps his arms to keep warm, he notices the ashtray on the
windowsill. A cigarette is perched on the ashtray, burning steadily through a long finger of ash. He
frowns, extinguishes the old butt, and replaces it with the new one.
The toothbrush has already been treated to a smudge of white paste. The tap is of the push-button
varietya dose of water with each nudge. Earl pushes the brush into his cheek and fiddles it back
and forth while he opens the medicine cabinet. The shelves are stocked with single-serving packages
of vitamins, aspirin, antidiuretics. The mouthwash is also single-serving, about a shot-glass-worth of
blue liquid in a sealed plastic bottle. Only the toothpaste is regular-sized. Earl spits the paste out of


his mouth and replaces it with the mouthwash. As he lays the toothbrush next to the toothpaste, he
notices a tiny wedge of paper pinched between the glass shelf and the steel backing of the medicine
cabinet. He spits the frothy blue fluid into the sink and nudges for some more water to rinse it
down. He closes the medicine cabinet and smiles at his reflection in the mirror.
"Who needs half an hour to brush their teeth?"
The paper has been folded down to a minuscule size with all the precision of a sixth-grader's love
note. Earl unfolds it and smooths it against the mirror. It reads
IF YOU CAN STILL READ THIS, THEN YOU'RE A FUCKING COWARD.
Earl stares blankly at the paper, then reads it again. He turns it over. On the back it reads
P.S.: AFTER YOU'VE READ THIS, HIDE IT AGAIN.
Earl reads both sides again, then folds the note back down to its original size and tucks it
underneath the toothpaste.
Maybe then he notices the scar. It begins just beneath the ear, jagged and thick, and disappears
abruptly into his hairline. Earl turns his head and stares out of the corner of his eye to follow the
scar's progress. He traces it with a fingertip, then looks back down at the cigarette burning in the
ashtray. A thought seizes him and he spins out of the bathroom.
He is caught at the door to his room, one hand on the knob. Two pictures are taped to the wall by
the door. Earl's attention is caught first by the MRI, a shiny black frame for four windows into
someone's skull. In marker, the picture is labeled YOUR BRAIN. Earl stares at it. Concentric circles
in different colors. He can make out the big orbs of his eyes and, behind these, the twin lobes of his
brain. Smooth wrinkles, circles, semicircles. But right there in the middle of his head, circled in
marker, tunneled in from the back of his neck like a maggot into an apricot, is something different.
Deformed, broken, but unmistakable. A dark smudge, the shape of a flower, right there in the
middle of his brain.
He bends to look at the other picture. It is a photograph of a man holding flowers, standing over a
fresh grave. The man is bent over, reading the headstone. For a moment this looks like a hall of
mirrors or the beginnings of a sketch of infinity: the one man bent over, looking at the smaller man,
bent over, reading the headstone. Earl looks at the picture for a long time. Maybe he begins to cry.
Maybe he just stares silently at the picture. Eventually, he makes his way back to the bed, flops
down, seals his eyes shut, tries to sleep.
The cigarette burns steadily away in the bathroom. A circuit in the alarm clock counts down from
ten, and it starts ringing again.
Earl opens one eye after another to a stretch of white ceiling tiles, interrupted by a hand-printed sign
taped right above his head, large enough for him to read from the bed.


You can't have a normal life anymore. You must know that. How can you have a girlfriend if you can't remember her
name? Can't have kids, not unless you want them to grow up with a dad who doesn't recognize them. Sure as hell
can't hold down a job. Not too many professions out there that value forgetfulness. Prostitution, maybe. Politics, of
course.
No. Your life is over. You're a dead man. The only thing the doctors are hoping to do is teach you to be less of a
burden to the orderlies. And they'll probably never let you go home, wherever that would be.
So the question is not "to be or not to be," because you aren't. The question is whether you want to do something about
it. Whether revenge matters to you.
It does to most people. For a few weeks, they plot, they scheme, they take measures to get even. But the passage of time
is all it takes to erode that initial impulse. Time is theft, isn't that what they say? And time eventually convinces most
of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance. Time
steals your nerve.
If time and fear aren't enough to dissuade people from their revenge, then there's always authority, softly shaking its
head and saying, We understand, but you're the better man for letting it go. For rising above it. For not sinking to
their level. And besides, says authority, if you try anything stupid, we'll lock you up in a little room.
But they already put you in a little room, didn't they? Only they don't really lock it or even guard it too carefully
because you're a cripple. A corpse. A vegetable who probably wouldn't remember to eat or take a shit if someone
wasn't there to remind you.
And as for the passage of time, well, that doesn't really apply to you anymore, does it? Just the same ten minutes, over
and over again. So how can you forgive if you can't remember to forget?
You probably were the type to let it go, weren't you? Before. But you're not the man you used to be. Not even half.
You're a fraction; you're the ten-minute man.
Of course, weakness is strong. It's the primary impulse. You'd probably prefer to sit in your little room and cry. Live
in your finite collection of memories, carefully polishing each one. Half a life set behind glass and pinned to cardboard
like a collection of exotic insects. You'd like to live behind that glass, wouldn't you? Preserved in aspic.
You'd like to but you can't, can you? You can't because of the last addition to your collection. The last thing you
remember. His face. His face and your wife, looking to you for help.
And maybe this is where you can retire to when it's over. Your little collection. They can lock you back up in another
little room and you can live the rest of your life in the past. But only if you've got a little piece of paper in your hand
that says you got him.
You know I'm right. You know there's a lot of work to do. It may seem impossible, but I'm sure if we all do our part,
we'll figure something out. But you don't have much time. You've only got about ten minutes, in fact. Then it starts all
over again. So do something with the time you've got.


EARL OPENS HIS EYES and blinks into the darkness. The alarm clock is ringing. It says 3:20, and
the moonlight streaming through the window means it must be the early morning. Earl fumbles for
the lamp, almost knocking it over in the process. Incandescent light fills the room, painting the
metal furniture yellow, the walls yellow, the bedspread, too. He lies back and looks up at the stretch
of yellow ceiling tiles above him, interrupted by a handwritten sign taped to the ceiling. He reads the
sign two, maybe three times, then blinks at the room around him.
It is a bare room. Institutional, maybe. There is a desk over by the window. The desk is bare except
for the blaring alarm clock. Earl probably notices, at this point, that he is fully clothed. He even has
his shoes on under the sheets. He extracts himself from the bed and crosses to the desk. Nothing in
the room would suggest that anyone lived there, or ever had, except for the odd scrap of tape stuck
here and there to the wall. No pictures, no books, nothing. Through the window, he can see a full
moon shining on carefully manicured grass.
Earl slaps the snooze button on the alarm clock and stares a moment at the two keys taped to the
back of his hand. He picks at the tape while he searches through the empty drawers. In the left
pocket of his jacket, he finds a roll of hundred-dollar bills and a letter sealed in an envelope. He
checks the rest of the main room and the bathroom. Bits of tape, cigarette butts. Nothing else.
Earl absentmindedly plays with the lump of scar tissue on his neck and moves back toward the bed.
He lies back down and stares up at the ceiling and the sign taped to it. The sign reads, GET UP,
GET OUT RIGHT NOW. THESE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO KILL YOU.
Earl closes his eyes.

They tried to teach you to make lists in grade school, remember? Back when your day planner was the back of your
hand. And if your assignments came off in the shower, well, then they didn't get done. No direction, they said. No
discipline. So they tried to get you to write it all down somewhere more permanent.
Of course, your grade-school teachers would be laughing their pants wet if they could see you now. Because you've
become the exact product of their organizational lessons. Because you can't even take a piss without consulting one of
your lists.
They were right. Lists are the only way out of this mess.
Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that
simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken
into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man
yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week,
every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the
conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.


This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity,
insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes
obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to
eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a
cheap parlor trick.
But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who
just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a
narcoleptic.
The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take
your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.
It's like a letter you write to yourself. A master plan, drafted by the guy who can see the light, made with steps simple
enough for the rest of the idiots to understand. Follow steps one through one hundred. Repeat as necessary.
Your problem is a little more acute, maybe, but fundamentally the same thing.
It's like that computer thing, the Chinese room. You remember that? One guy sits in a little room, laying down cards
with letters written on them in a language he doesn't understand, laying them down one letter at a time in a sequence
according to someone else's instructions. The cards are supposed to spell out a joke in Chinese. The guy doesn't speak
Chinese, of course. He just follows his instructions.
There are some obvious differences in your situation, of course: You broke out of the room they had you in, so the whole
enterprise has to be portable. And the guy giving the instructionsthat's you, too, just an earlier version of you. And
the joke you're telling, well, it's got a punch line. I just don't think anyone's going to find it very funny.
So that's the idea. All you have to do is follow your instructions. Like climbing a ladder or descending a staircase.
One step at a time. Right down the list. Simple.
And the secret, of course, to any list is to keep it in a place where you're bound to see it.

HE CAN HEAR THE BUZZING through his eyelids. Insistent. He reaches out for the alarm
clock, but he can't move his arm.
Earl opens his eyes to see a large man bent double over him. The man looks up at him, annoyed,
then resumes his work. Earl looks around him. Too dark for a doctor's office.
Then the pain floods his brain, blocking out the other questions. He squirms again, trying to yank
his forearm away, the one that feels like it's burning. The arm doesn't move, but the man shoots him
another scowl. Earl adjusts himself in the chair to see over the top of the man's head.


The noise and the pain are both coming from a gun in the man's handa gun with a needle where
the barrel should be. The needle is digging into the fleshy underside of Earl's forearm, leaving a trail
of puffy letters behind it.
Earl tries to rearrange himself to get a better view, to read the letters on his arm, but he can't. He lies
back and stares at the ceiling.
Eventually the tattoo artist turns off the noise, wipes Earl's forearm with a piece of gauze, and
wanders over to the back to dig up a pamphlet describing how to deal with a possible infection.
Maybe later he'll tell his wife about this guy and his little note. Maybe his wife will convince him to
call the police.
Earl looks down at the arm. The letters are rising up from the skin, weeping a little. They run from
just behind the strap of Earl's watch all the way to the inside of his elbow. Earl blinks at the message
and reads it again. It says, in careful little capitals, I RAPED AND KILLED YOUR WIFE.

It's your birthday today, so I got you a little present. I would have just bought you a beer, but who knows where that
would have ended?
So instead, I got you a bell. I think I may have had to pawn your watch to buy it, but what the hell did you need a
watch for, anyway?
You're probably asking yourself, Why a bell? In fact, I'm guessing you're going to be asking yourself that question
every time you find it in your pocket. Too many of these letters now. Too many for you to dig back into every time you
want to know the answer to some little question.
It's a joke, actually. A practical joke. But think of it this way: I'm not really laughing at you so much as with you.
I'd like to think that every time you take it out of your pocket and wonder, Why do I have this bell? a little part of
you, a little piece of your broken brain, will remember and laugh, like I'm laughing now.
Besides, you do know the answer. It was something you learned before. So if you think about it, you'll know.
Back in the old days, people were obsessed with the fear of being buried alive. You remember now? Medical science not
being quite what it is today, it wasn't uncommon for people to suddenly wake up in a casket. So rich folks had their
coffins outfitted with breathing tubes. Little tubes running up to the mud above so that if someone woke up when they
weren't supposed to, they wouldn't run out of oxygen. Now, they must have tested this out and realized that you could
shout yourself hoarse through the tube, but it was too narrow to carry much noise. Not enough to attract attention, at
least. So a string was run up the tube to a little bell attached to the headstone. If a dead person came back to life, all
he had to do was ring his little bell till someone came and dug him up again.
I'm laughing now, picturing you on a bus or maybe in a fast-food restaurant, reaching into your pocket and finding
your little bell and wondering to yourself where it came from, why you have it. Maybe you'll even ring it.


Happy birthday, buddy.
I don't know who figured out the solution to our mutual problem, so I don't know whether to congratulate you or me.
A bit of a lifestyle change, admittedly, but an elegant solution, nonetheless.
Look to yourself for the answer.
That sounds like something out of a Hallmark card. I don't know when you thought it up, but my hat's off to you.
Not that you know what the hell I'm talking about. But, honestly, a real brainstorm. After all, everybody else needs
mirrors to remind themselves who they are. You're no different.

THE LITTLE MECHANICAL VOICE PAUSES, then repeats itself. It says, "The time is 8:00 a.m.
This is a courtesy call." Earl opens his eyes and replaces the receiver. The phone is perched on a
cheap veneer headboard that stretches behind the bed, curves to meet the corner, and ends at the
minibar. The TV is still on, blobs of flesh color nattering away at each other. Earl lies back down
and is surprised to see himself, older now, tanned, the hair pulling away from his head like solar
flares. The mirror on the ceiling is cracked, the silver fading in creases. Earl continues to stare at
himself, astonished by what he sees. He is fully dressed, but the clothes are old, threadbare in places.
Earl feels the familiar spot on his left wrist for his watch, but it's gone. He looks down from the
mirror to his arm. It is bare and the skin has changed to an even tan, as if he never owned a watch in
the first place. The skin is even in color except for the solid black arrow on the inside of Earl's wrist,
pointing up his shirtsleeve. He stares at the arrow for a moment. Perhaps he doesn't try to rub it off
anymore. He rolls up his sleeve.
The arrow points to a sentence tattooed along Earl's inner arm. Earl reads the sentence once, maybe
twice. Another arrow picks up at the beginning of the sentence, points farther up Earl's arm,
disappearing under the rolled-up shirtsleeve. He unbuttons his shirt.
Looking down on his chest, he can make out the shapes but cannot bring them into focus, so he
looks up at the mirror above him.
The arrow leads up Earl's arm, crosses at the shoulder, and descends onto his upper torso,
terminating at a picture of a man's face that occupies most of his chest. The face is that of a large
man, balding, with a mustache and a goatee. It is a particular face, but like a police sketch it has a
certain unreal quality.
The rest of his upper torso is covered in words, phrases, bits of information, and instructions, all of
them written backward on Earl, forward in the mirror.
Eventually Earl sits up, buttons his shirt, and crosses to the desk. He takes out a pen and a piece of
notepaper from the desk drawer, sits, and begins to write.


I don't know where you'll be when you read this. I'm not even sure if you'll bother to read this. I guess you don't need
to.
It's a shame, really, that you and I will never meet. But, like the song says, "By the time you read this note, I'll be
gone."
We're so close now. That's the way it feels. So many pieces put together, spelled out. I guess it's just a matter of time
until you find him.
Who knows what we've done to get here? Must be a hell of a story, if only you could remember any of it. I guess it's
better that you can't.
I had a thought just now. Maybe you'll find it useful.
Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day
was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded
off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering
around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.
I guess if that's true, then it doesn't matter what you do. No expectations. If you can't find him, then it doesn't matter,
because nothing matters. And if you do find him, then you can kill him without worrying about the consequences.
Because there are no consequences.
That's what I'm thinking about right now, in this scrappy little room. Framed pictures of ships on the wall. I don't
know, obviously, but if I had to guess, I'd say we're somewhere up the coast. If you're wondering why your left arm is
five shades browner than your right, I don't know what to tell you. I guess we must have been driving for a while.
And, no, I don't know what happened to your watch.
And all these keys: I have no idea. Not a one that I recognize. Car keys and house keys and the little fiddly keys for
padlocks. What have we been up to?
I wonder if he'll feel stupid when you find him. Tracked down by the ten-minute man. Assassinated by a vegetable.
I'll be gone in a moment. I'll put down the pen, close my eyes, and then you can read this through if you want.
I just wanted you to know that I'm proud of you. No one who matters is left to say it. No one left is going to want to.

EARL'S EYES ARE WIDE OPEN, staring through the window of the car. Smiling eyes. Smiling
through the window at the crowd gathering across the street. The crowd gathering around the body
in the doorway. The body emptying slowly across the sidewalk and into the storm drain.
A stocky guy, facedown, eyes open. Balding head, goatee. In death, as in police sketches, faces tend
to look the same. This is definitely somebody in particular. But really, it could be anybody.


Earl is still smiling at the body as the car pulls away from the curb. The car? Who's to say? Maybe it's
a police cruiser. Maybe it's just a taxi.
As the car is swallowed into traffic, Earl's eyes continue to shine out into the night, watching the
body until it disappears into a circle of concerned pedestrians. He chuckles to himself as the car
continues to make distance between him and the growing crowd.
Earl's smile fades a little. Something has occurred to him. He begins to pat down his pockets;
leisurely at first, like a man looking for his keys, then a little more desperately. Maybe his progress is
impeded by a set of handcuffs. He begins to empty the contents of his pockets out onto the seat
next to him. Some money. A bunch of keys. Scraps of paper.
A round metal lump rolls out of his pocket and slides across the vinyl seat. Earl is frantic now. He
hammers at the plastic divider between him and the driver, begging the man for a pen. Perhaps the
cabbie doesn't speak much English. Perhaps the cop isn't in the habit of talking to suspects. Either
way, the divider between the man in front and the man behind remains closed. A pen is not
forthcoming.
The car hits a pothole, and Earl blinks at his reflection in the rearview mirror. He is calm now. The
driver makes another corner, and the metal lump slides back over to rest against Earl's leg with a
little jingle. He picks it up and looks at it, curious now. It is a little bell. A little metal bell. Inscribed
on it are his name and a set of dates. He recognizes the first one: the year in which he was born. But
the second date means nothing to him. Nothing at all.
As he turns the bell over in his hands, he notices the empty space on his wrist where his watch used
to sit. There is a little arrow there, pointing up his arm. Earl looks at the arrow, then begins to roll
up his sleeve.

"You'd be late for your own funeral," she'd say. Remember? The more I think about it, the more trite that seems.
What kind of idiot, after all, is in any kind of rush to get to the end of his own story?
And how would I know if I were late, anyway? I don't have a watch anymore. I don't know what we did with it.
What the hell do you need a watch for, anyway? It was an antique. Deadweight tugging at your wrist. Symbol of the
old you. The you that believed in time.
No. Scratch that. It's not so much that you've lost your faith in time as that time has lost its faith in you. And who
needs it, anyway? Who wants to be one of those saps living in the safety of the future, in the safety of the moment after
the moment in which they felt something powerful? Living in the next moment, in which they feel nothing. Crawling
down the hands of the clock, away from the people who did unspeakable things to them. Believing the lie that time will
heal all woundswhich is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.
But you're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A
singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time


moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But
not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.
Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over.
You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep tryingand you have to keep tryingeventually
you will come across the next item on your list.



Sonny's Blues
by James Baldwin
I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it,
and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling
out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of
the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.
It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the
high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny.
He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there
slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting,
sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less.
Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or
that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at a moment when I was remembering
some specific thing Sonny had once said or done. When he was about as old as the boys in my
classes his face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; and he'd had wonderfully
direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy. I wondered what he looked like now. He had
been picked up, the evening before, in a raid on an apartment down-town, for peddling and using
heroin.
I couldn't believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside
me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn't wanted to know. I had had suspicions, but I
didn't name them, I kept putting them away. I told myself that Sonny was wild, but he wasn't crazy.
And he'd always been a good boy, he hadn't ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids
can, so quick, so quick, especially in Harlem. I didn't want to believe that I'd ever see my brother
going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out, in the condition I'd already seen
so many others. Yet it had happened and here I was, talking about algebra to a lot of boys who
might, every one of them for all I knew, be popping off needles every time they went to the head.
Maybe it did more for them than algebra could.
I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldn't have been much older than these
boys were now. These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a
rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were
filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now
closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness,
and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other
time, and more alone.
When the last bell rang, the last class ended, I let out my breath. It seemed I'd been holding it for all
that time. My clothes were wet-I may have looked as though I'd been sitting in a steam bath, all
dressed up, all afternoon. I sat alone in the classroom a long time. I listened to the boys outside,
downstairs, shouting and cursing and laughing. Their laughter struck me for perhaps the first time. It
was not the joyous laughter which-God knows why-one associates with children. It was mocking
and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of
their curses. Perhaps I was listening to them because I was thinking about my brother and in them I
heard my brother. And myself.


One boy was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring
out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh,
bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds.
I stood up and walked over to the window and looked down into the court-yard. It was the
beginning of the spring and the sap was rising in the boys. A teacher passed through them every
now and again, quickly, as though he or she couldn't wait to get out of that courtyard, to get those
boys out of their sight and off their minds. I started collecting my stuff. I thought I'd better get
home and talk to Isabel.
The courtyard was almost deserted by the time I got downstairs. I saw this boy standing in the
shadow of a doorway, looking just like Sonny. I almost called his name. Then I saw that it wasn't
Sonny, but somebody we used to know, a boy from around our block. He'd been Sonny's friend.
He'd never been mine, having been too young for me, and, anyway, I'd never liked him. And now,
even though he was a grown-up man, he still hung around that block, still spent hours on the street
corners, was always high and raggy. I used to run into him from time to time and he'd often work
around to asking me for a quarter or fifty cents. He always had some real good excuse, too, and I
always gave it to him. I don't know why.
But now, abruptly, I hated him. I couldn't stand the way he looked at me, partly like a dog, partly like
a cunning child. I wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing in the school courtyard.
He sort of shuffled over to me, and he said, "I see you got the papers. So you already know about
it."
"You mean about Sonny? Yes, I already know about it. How come they didn't get you?"
He grinned. It made him repulsive and it also brought to mind what he'd looked like as a kid.
"I wasn't there. I stay away from them people."
"Good for you." I offered him a cigarette and I watched him through the smoke. "You come all the
way down here just to tell me about Sonny?"
"That's right." He was sort of shaking his head and his eyes looked strange, as though they were
about to cross. The bright sun deadened his damp dark brown skin and it made his eyes look yellow
and showed up the dirt in his kinked hair. He smelled funky. I moved a little away from him and I
said, "Well, thanks. But I already know about it and I got to get home."
"I'll walk you a little ways," he said. We started walking. There were a couple of lads still loitering in
the courtyard and one of them said goodnight to me and looked strangely at the boy beside me.
"What're you going to do?" he asked me. "I mean, about Sonny?"
"Look. I haven't seen Sonny for over a year, I'm not sure I'm going to do anything. Anyway, what
the hell can I do?"
"That's right," he said quickly, "ain't nothing you can do. Can't much help old Sonny no more, I
guess."
It was what I was thinking and so it seemed to me he had no right to say it.
"I'm surprised at Sonny, though," he went on-he had a funny way of talking, he looked straight
ahead as though he were talking to himself-"I thought Sonny was a smart boy, I thought he was too
smart to get hung."
"I guess he thought so too," I said sharply, "and that's how he got hung. And how about you?
You're pretty goddamn smart, I bet."
Then he looked directly at me, just for a minute. "I ain't smart," he said. "If I was smart, I'd have
reached for a pistol a long time ago."


"Look. Don't tell me your sad story, if it was up to me, I'd give you one." Then I felt guilty- guilty,
probably, for never having supposed that the poor bastard had a story of his own, much less a sad
one, and I asked, quickly, "What's going to happen to him now?"
He didn't answer this. He was off by himself some place.
"Funny thing," he said, and from his tone we might have been discussing the quickest way to get to
Brooklyn, "when I saw the papers this morning, the first thing I asked myself was if I had anything
to do with it. I felt sort of responsible."
I began to listen more carefully. The subway station was on the corner, just before us, and I stopped.
He stopped, too. We were in front of a bar and he ducked slightly, peering in, but whoever he was
looking for didn't seem to be there. The juke box was blasting away with something black and
bouncy and I half watched the barmaid as she danced her way from the juke box to her place behind
the bar. And I watched her face as she laughingly responded to something someone said to her, still
keeping time to the music. When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-
struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore.
"I never give Sonny nothing," the boy said finally, "but a long time ago I come to school high and
Sonny asked me how it felt." He paused, I couldn't bear to watch him, I watched the barmaid, and I
listened to the music which seemed to be causing the pavement to shake. "I told him it felt great."
The music stopped, the barmaid paused and watched the juke box until the music began again. "It
did."
All this was carrying me some place I didn't want to go. I certainly didn't want to know how it felt. It
filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and
this menace was their reality.
"What's going to happen to him now?" I asked again.
"They'll send him away some place and they'll try to cure him." He shook his head. "Maybe he'll
even think he's kicked the habit. Then they'll let him loose"-he gestured, throwing his cigarette into
the gutter. "That's all."
"What do you mean, that's all?"
But I knew what he meant.
"I mean, that's all." He turned his head and looked at me, pulling down the corners of his
mouth. "Don't you know what I mean?" he asked, softly.
"How the hell would I know what you mean?" I almost whispered it, I don't know why.
"That's right," he said to the air, "how would he know what I mean?" He turned toward me
again, patient and calm, and yet I somehow felt him shaking, shaking as though he were
going to fall apart. I felt that ice in my guts again, the dread I'd felt all afternoon; and again I
watched the barmaid, moving about the bar, washing glasses, and singing. "Listen. They'll let
him out and then it'll just start all over again. That's what I mean."
"You mean-they'll let him out. And then he'll just start working his way back in again. You
mean he'll never kick the habit. Is that what you mean?"
"That's right," he said, cheerfully. "You see what I mean."
"Tell me," I said at last, "why does he want to die? He must want to die, he's killing himself,
why does he want to die?"
He looked at me in surprise. He licked his lips. "He don't want to die. He wants to live. Don't
nobody want to die, ever."
Then I wanted to ask him-too many things. He could not have answered, or if he had, I could
not have borne the answers. I started walking. "Well, I guess it's none of my business."


"It's going to be rough on old Sonny," he said. We reached the subway station. "This is your
station?" he asked. I nodded. I took one step down. "Damn!" he said, suddenly. I looked up at him.
He grinned again. "Damn it if I didn't leave all my money home. You ain't got a dollar on you, have
you? Just for a couple of days, is all."
All at once something inside gave and threatened to come pouring out of me. I didn't hate
him any more. I felt that in another moment I'd start crying like a child.
"Sure," I said. "Don't sweat." I looked in my wallet and didn't have a dollar, I only had a five.
"Here," I said. "That hold you?"
He didn't look at it-he didn't want to look at it. A terrible, closed look came over his face, as
though he were keeping the number on the bill a secret from him and me. "Thanks," he said,
and now he was dying to see me go. "Don't worry about Sonny. Maybe I'll write him or
something."
"Sure," I said. "You do that. So long."
"Be seeing you," he said. I went on down the steps.
And I didn't write Sonny or send him anything for a long time. When I finally did, it was just
after my little girl died, and he wrote me back a letter which made me feel like a bastard.
Here's what he said:
Dear brother,
You don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I
dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's
been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up
there, outside. I got to get outside.
I can't tell you much about how I got here. I mean I don't know how to tell you. I guess I was
afraid of something or I was trying to escape from something and you know I have never
been very strong in the head (smile). I'm glad Mama and Daddy are dead and can't see
what's happened to their son and I swear if I'd known what I was doing I would never have
hurt you so, you and a lot of other fine people who were nice to me and who believed in me.
I don't want you to think it had anything to do with me being a musician.
It's more than that. Or maybe less than that. I can't get anything straight in my head down
here and I try not to think about what's going to happen to me when I get outside again.
Sometime I think I'm going to flip and never get outside and sometime I think I'll come
straight back. I tell you one thing, though, I'd rather blow my brains out than go through this
again. But that's what they all say, so they tell me. If I tell you when I'm coming to New York
and if you could meet me, I sure would appreciate it. Give my love to Isabel and the kids and
I was sure sorry to hear about little Gracie. I wish I could be like Mama and say the Lord's will
be done, but I don't know it seems to me that trouble is the one thing that never does get
stopped and I don't know what good it does to blame it on the
Lord. But maybe it does some good if you believe it.
Your brother,
Sonny
Then I kept in constant touch with him and I sent him whatever I could and I went to meet
him when he came back to New York. When I saw him many things I thought I had forgotten
came flooding back to me. This was because I had begun, finally, to wonder about Sonny, about the
life that Sonny lived inside. This life, whatever it was, had made him older and
thinner and it had deepened the distant stillness in which he had always moved. He looked


very unlike my baby brother. Yet, when he smiled, when we shook hands, the baby brother
I'd never known looked out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be
coaxed into the light.
"How you been keeping?" he asked me.
"All right. And you?"
"Just fine." He was smiling all over his face. "It's good to see you again."
"It's good to see you."
The seven years' difference in our ages lay between us like a chasm: I wondered if these
years would ever operate between us as a bridge. I was remembering, and it made it hard to
catch my breath, that I had been there when he was born; and I had heard the first words he
had ever spoken. When he started to walk, he walked from our mother straight to me. I
caught him just before he fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world.
"How's Isabel?"
"Just fine. She's dying to see you."
"And the boys?"
"They're fine, too. They're anxious to see their uncle."
"Oh, come on. You know they don't remember me."
"Are you kidding? Of course they remember you."
He grinned again. We got into a taxi. We had a lot to say to each other, far too much to know how
to begin.
As the taxi began to move, I asked, "You still want to go to India?"
He laughed. "You still remember that. Hell, no. This place is Indian enough for me."
"It used to belong to them," I said.
And he laughed again. "They damn sure knew what they were doing when they got rid of it."
Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India.
He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad,
naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it
sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort
of looked down on me for that.
"Do you mind," he asked, "if we have the driver drive alongside the park? On the west side-I
haven't seen the city in so long."
"Of course not," I said. I was afraid that I might sound as though I were humoring him, but I hoped
he wouldn't take it that way.
So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels
and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets
hadn't changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle
of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had vanished, as had the
stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops
from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks. But houses exactly like the houses of our past
yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found
themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and
found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got
out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave
it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I was a school teacher;
or that Sonny had, he hadn't lived in Harlem for years. Yet, as the cab moved uptown


through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly
studied Sonny's face, it came to me that what we both were seeking through our separate
cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It's always at the hour of
trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.
We hit 110th Street and started rolling up Lenox Avenue. And I'd known this avenue all my
life, but it seemed to me again, as it had seemed on the day I'd first heard about Sonny's
trouble, filled with a hidden menace which was its very breath of life.
"We almost there," said Sonny.
"Almost." We were both too nervous to say anything more.
We live in a housing project. It hasn't been up long. A few days after it was up it seemed
uninhabitably new, now, of course, it's already rundown. It looks like a parody of the good,
clean, faceless life-God knows the people who live in it do their best to make it a parody. The
beat-looking grass lying around isn't enough to make their lives green, the hedges will never
hold out the streets, and they know it. The big windows fool no one, they aren't big enough to
make space out of no space. They don't bother with the windows, they watch the TV screen
instead. The playground is most popular with the children who don't play at jacks, or skip
rope, or roller skate, or swing, and they can be found in it after dark. We moved in partly
because it's not too far from where I teach, and partly for the kids; but it's really just like the
houses in which Sonny and I grew up. The same things happen, they'll have the same things
to remember. The moment Sonny and I started into the house I had the feeling that I was
simply bringing him back into the danger he had almost died trying to escape.
Sonny has never been talkative. So I don't know why I was sure he'd be dying to talk to me
when supper was over the first night. Everything went fine, the oldest boy remembered him,
and the youngest boy liked him, and Sonny had remembered to bring something for each of
them; and Isabel, who is really much nicer than I am, more open and giving, had gone to a
lot of trouble about dinner and was genuinely glad to see him. And she's always been able to
tease Sonny in a way that I haven't. It was nice to see her face so vivid again and to hear her
laugh and watch her make Sonny laugh. She wasn't, or, anyway, she didn't seem to be, at all
uneasy or embarrassed. She chatted as though there were no subject which had to be
avoided and she got Sonny past his first, faint stiffness. And thank God she was there, for I
was filled with that icy dread again. Everything I did seemed awkward to me, and everything I
said sounded freighted with hidden meaning. I was trying to remember everything I'd heard
about dope addiction and I couldn't help watching Sonny for signs. I wasn't doing it out of
malice. I was trying to find out something about my brother. I was dying to hear him tell me
he was safe.
"Safe!" my father grunted, whenever Mama suggested trying to move to a neighborhood which
might be safer for children. "Safe, hell! Ain't no place safe for kids, nor nobody."
He always went on like this, but he wasn't, ever, really as bad as he sounded, not even on
weekends, when he got drunk. As a matter of fact, he was always on the lookout for
"something a little better," but he died before he found it. He died suddenly, during a
drunken weekend in the middle of the war, when Sonny was fifteen. He and Sonny hadn't
ever got on too well. And this was partly because Sonny was the apple of his father's eye. It
was because he loved Sonny so much and was frightened for him, that he was always
fighting with him. It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside
himself, where he can't be reached. But the principal reason that they never hit it off is that


they were so much alike. Daddy was big and rough and loud-talking, just the opposite of
Sonny, but they both had-that same privacy.
Mama tried to tell me something about this, just after Daddy died. I was home on leave from
the army.
This was the last time I ever saw my mother alive. Just the same, this picture gets all mixed
up in my mind with pictures I had other when she was younger. The way I always see her is
the way she used to be on a Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were talking after the
big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale blue. She'd be sitting on the sofa. And my
father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be full of
church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night
is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against
the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling
beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it's real quiet in the room. For a
moment nobody's talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. And my
mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at
something a child can't see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying
on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly
stroking the lad's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in
the comer. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child
obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop-will never
die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around
the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's
happened to them and their kinfolk.
But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already
ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will
remember the children and they won't talk any more that day. And when light fills the room,
the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a
little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been
talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they
won't talk any more because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll
know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him.
The last time I talked to my mother, I remember I was restless. I wanted to get out and see
Isabel. We weren't married then and we had a lot to straighten out between us.
There Mama sat, in black, by the window. She was humming an old church song. Lord, you
brought me from a long ways off. Sonny was out somewhere. Mama kept watching the
streets.
"I don't know," she said, "if I'll ever see you again, after you go off from here. But I hope you'll
remember the things I tried to teach you."
"Don't talk like that," I said, and smiled. "You'll be here a long time yet."
She smiled, too, but she said nothing. She was quiet for a long time. And I said, "Mama,don't you
worry about nothing. I'll be writing all the time, and you be getting the checks...."
"I want to talk to you about your brother," she said, suddenly. "If anything happens to me he ain't
going to have nobody to look out for him."
"Mama," I said, "ain't nothing going to happen to you or Sonny. Sonny's all right. He's a good
boy and he's got good sense."


"It ain't a question of his being a good boy," Mama said, "nor of his having good sense. It
ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under." She stopped,
looking at me. "Your Daddy once had a brother," she said, and she smiled in a way that
made me feel she was in pain. "You didn't never know that, did you?"
"No," I said, "I never knew that," and I watched her face.
"Oh, yes," she said, "your Daddy had a brother." She looked out of the window again. "I know you
never saw your Daddy cry. But I did-many a time, through all these years."
I asked her, "What happened to his brother? How come nobody's ever talked about him?"
This was the first time I ever saw my mother look old.
"His brother got killed," she said, "when he was just a little younger than you are now. I knew him.
He was a fine boy. He was maybe a little full of the devil, but he didn't mean nobody no harm."
Then she stopped and the room was silent, exactly as it had sometimes been on those Sunday
afternoons. Mama kept looking out into the streets.
"He used to have a job in the mill," she said, "and, like all young folks, he just liked to
perform on Saturday nights. Saturday nights, him and your father would drift around to
different places, go to dances and things like that, or just sit around with people they knew,
and your father's brother would sing, he had a fine voice, and play along with himself on his
guitar. Well, this particular Saturday night, him and your father was coming home from some
place, and they were both a little drunk and there was a moon that night, it was bright like
day. Your father's brother was feeling kind of good, and he was whistling to himself, and he
had his guitar slung over his shoulder. They was coming down a hill and beneath them was a
road that turned off from the highway. Well, your father's brother, being always kind of frisky,
decided to run down this hill, and he did, with that guitar banging and clanging behind him,
and he ran across the road, and he was making water behind a tree. And your father was
sort of amused at him and he was still coming down the hill, kind of slow. Then he heard a
car motor and that same minute his brother stepped from behind the tree, into the road, in
the moonlight. And he started to cross the road. And your father started to run down the hill,
he says he don't know why. This car was full of white men. They was all drunk, and when
they seen your father's brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they aimed the car
straight at him. They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do
sometimes, you know. But they was drunk. And I guess the boy, being drunk, too, and
scared, kind of lost his head. By the time he jumped it was too late. Your father says he
heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar
when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting,
and the car kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day. And, time your father got down
the hill, his brother weren't nothing but blood and pulp."
Tears were gleaming on my mother's face. There wasn't anything I could say.
"He never mentioned it," she said, "because I never let him mention it before you children.
Your Daddy was like a crazy man that night and for many a night thereafter. He says he
never in his life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone
away. Weren't nothing, weren't nobody on that road, just your Daddy and his brother and
that busted guitar. Oh, yes. Your Daddy never did really get right again. Till the day he died
he weren't sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother."
She stopped and took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes and looked at me.


"I ain't telling you all this," she said, "to make you scared or bitter or to make you hate nobody. I'm
telling you this because you got a brother. And the world ain't changed."
I guess I didn't want to believe this. I guess she saw this in my face. She turned away from me,
toward the window again, searching those streets.
"But I praise my Redeemer," she said at last, "that He called your Daddy home before me. I ain't
saying it to throw no flowers at myself, but, I declare, it keeps me from feeling too cast down to
know I helped your father get safely through this world. Your father always acted like he was the
roughest, strongest man on earth. And everybody took him to be like that. But if he hadn't had me
there-to see his tears!"
She was crying again. Still, I couldn't move. I said, "Lord, Lord, Mama, I didn't know it was
like that."
"Oh, honey," she said, "there's a lot that you don't know. But you are going to find out." She stood
up from the window and came over to me. "You got to hold on to your brother," she said, "and
don't let him fall, no matter what it looks like is happening to him and no matter how evil you gets
with him. You going to be evil with him many a time. But don't you forget what I told you, you
hear?"
"I won't forget," I said. "Don't you worry, I won't forget. I won't let nothing happen to Sonny."
My mother smiled as though she was amused at something she saw in my face. Then, "You
may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you's there."
Two days later I was married, and then I was gone. And I had a lot of things on my mind and I
pretty well forgot my promise to Mama until I got shipped home on a special furlough for her
funeral.
And, after the funeral, with just Sonny and me alone in the empty kitchen, I tried to find out
something about him.
"What do you want to do?" I asked him.
"I'm going to be a musician," he said.
For he had graduated, in the time I had been away, from dancing to the juke box to finding
out who was playing what, and what they were doing with it, and he had bought himself a set
of drums.
"You mean, you want to be a drummer?" I somehow had the feeling that being a drummer
might be all right for other people but not for my brother Sonny.
"I don't think," he said, looking at me very gravely, "that I'll ever be a good drummer. But I
think I can play a piano."
I frowned. I'd never played the role of the oldest brother quite so seriously before, had
scarcely ever, in fact, asked Sonny a damn thing. I sensed myself in the presence of
something I didn't really know how to handle, didn't understand. So I made my frown a little
deeper as I asked: "What kind of musician do you want to be?"
He grinned. "How many kinds do you think there are?"
"Be serious," I said.
He laughed, throwing his head back, and then looked at me. "I am serious."
"Well, then, for Christ's sake, stop kidding around and answer a serious question. I mean, do
you want to be a concert pianist, you want to play classical music and all that, or-or what?"
Long before I finished he was laughing again. "For Christ's sake. Sonny!"
He sobered, but with difficulty. "I'm sorry. But you sound so-scared!" and he was off again.
"Well, you may think it's funny now, baby, but it's not going to be so funny when you have to


make your living at it, let me tell you that." I was furious because I knew he was laughing at
me and I didn't know why.
"No," he said, very sober now, and afraid, perhaps, that he'd hurt me, "I don't want to be a
classical pianist. That isn't what interests me. I mean"-he paused, looking hard at me, as
though his eyes would help me to understand, and then gestured helplessly, as though
perhaps his hand would help-"I mean, I'll have a lot of studying to do, and I'll have to study
everything, but, I mean, I want to play with-jazz musicians." He stopped. "I want to play jazz,"
he said.
Well, the word had never before sounded as heavy, as real, as it sounded that afternoon in
Sonny's mouth. I just looked at him and I was probably frowning a real frown by this time. I
simply couldn't see why on earth he'd want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs,
clowning around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around a dance floor. It
seemed-beneath him, somehow. I had never thought about it before, had never been forced
to, but I suppose I had always put jazz musicians in a class with what Daddy called "good-
time people."
"Are you serious?"
"Hell, yes, I'm serious."
He looked more helpless than ever, and annoyed, and deeply hurt.
I suggested, helpfully: "You mean-like Louis Armstrong?"
His face closed as though I'd struck him. "No. I'm not talking about none of that old-time,
down home crap."
"Well, look, Sonny, I'm sorry, don't get mad. I just don't altogether get it, that's all. Name
somebody-you know, a jazz musician you admire."
"Bird."
"Who?"
"Bird! Charlie Parker! Don't they teach you nothing in the goddamn army?"
I lit a cigarette. I was surprised and then a little amused to discover that I was trembling.
"I've been out of touch," I said. "You'll have to be patient with me. Now. Who's this Parker
character?"
"He's just one of the greatest jazz musicians alive," said Sonny, sullenly, his hands in his
pockets, his back to me. "Maybe the greatest," he added, bitterly, "that's probably why you
never heard of him."
"All right," I said, "I'm ignorant. I'm sorry. I'll go out and buy all the cat's records right away, all
right?"
"It don't," said Sonny, with dignity, "make any difference to me. I don't care what you listen to.
Don't do me no favors."
I was beginning to realize that I'd never seen him so upset before. With another part of my
mind I was thinking that this would probably turn out to be one of those things kids go
through and that I shouldn't make it seem important by pushing it too hard. Still, I didn't
think it would do any harm to ask: "Doesn't all this take a lot of time? Can you make a living
at it?"
He turned back to me and half leaned, half sat, on the kitchen table. "Everything takes time,"
he said, "and-well, yes, sure, I can make a living at it. But what I don't seem to be able to
make you understand is that it's the only thing I want to do."
"Well, Sonny," I said gently, "you know people can't always do exactly what they want to do-"


"No, I don't know that," said Sonny, surprising me. "I think people ought to do what they want to
do, what else are they alive for?"
"You getting to be a big boy," I said desperately, "it's time you started thinking about your future."
"I'm thinking about my future," said Sonny, grimly. "I think about it all the time."
I gave up. I decided, if he didn't change his mind, that we could always talk about it later. "In
the meantime," I said, "you got to finish school." We had already decided that he'd have to
move in with Isabel and her folks. I knew this wasn't the ideal arrangement because Isabel's
folks are inclined to be dicty and they hadn't especially wanted Isabel to marry me. But I
didn't know what else to do. "And we have to get you fixed up at Isabel's."
There was a long silence. He moved from the kitchen table to the window. "That's a terrible idea.
You know it yourself."
"Do you have a better idea?"
He just walked up and down the kitchen for a minute. He was as tall as I was. He had started to
shave. I suddenly had the feeling that I didn't know him at all.
He stopped at the kitchen table and picked up my cigarettes. Looking at me with a land of mocking,
amused defiance, he put one between his lips. "You mind?"
"You smoking already?"
He lit the cigarette and nodded, watching me through the smoke. "I just wanted to see if I'd have the
courage to smoke in front of you." He grinned and blew a great cloud of smoke to the ceiling. "It
was easy." He looked at my face. "Come on, now. I bet you was smoking at my age, tell the truth."
I didn't say anything but the truth was on my face, and he laughed. But now there was something
very strained in his laugh. "Sure. And I bet that ain't all you was doing."
He was frightening me a little. "Cut the crap," I said. "We already decided that you was going to go
and live at Isabel's. Now what's got into you all of a sudden?"
"You decided it," he pointed out. "I didn't decide nothing." He stopped in front of me, leaning
against the stove, arms loosely folded. "Look, brother. I don't want to stay in Harlem no
more, I really don't." He was very earnest. He looked at me, then over toward the kitchen
window. There was something in his eyes I'd never seen before, some thoughtfulness, some
worry all his own. He rubbed the muscle of one arm. "It's time I was getting out of here."
"Where do you want to go. Sonny?"
"I want to join the army. Or the navy, I don't care. If I say I'm old enough, they'll believe me."
Then I got mad. It was because I was so scared. "You must be crazy. You goddamn fool, what the
hell do you want to go and join the army for?"
"I just told you. To get out of Harlem."
"Sonny, you haven't even finished school. And if you really want to be a musician, how do you
expect to study if you're in the army?"
He looked at me, trapped, and in anguish. "There's ways. I might be able to work out some kind of
deal. Anyway, I'll have the G.I. Bill when I come out."
"If you come out." We stared at each other. "Sonny, please. Be reasonable. I know the setup is far
from perfect. But we got to do the best we can."
"I ain't learning nothing in school," he said. "Even when I go." He turned away from me and
opened the window and threw his cigarette out into the narrow alley. I watched his back. "At least, I
ain't learning nothing you'd want me to learn." He slammed the window so hard I thought the glass
would fly out, and turned back to me. "And I'm sick of the stink of these garbage cans!"
"Sonny," I said, "I know how you feel. But if you don't finish school now, you're going to be


sorry later that you didn't." I grabbed him by the shoulders. "And you only got another year. It
ain't so bad. And I'll come back and I swear I'll help you do whatever you want to do. Just try to put
up with it till I come back. Will you please do that? For me?"
He didn't answer and he wouldn't look at me.
"Sonny. You hear me?"
He pulled away. "I hear you. But you never hear anything I say."
I didn't know what to say to that. He looked out of the window and then back at me. "OK," he said,
and sighed. "I'll try."
Then I said, trying to cheer him up a little, "They got a piano at Isabel's. You can practice on it."
And as a matter of fact, it did cheer him up for a minute. "That's right," he said to himself. "I forgot
that." His face relaxed a little. But the worry, the thoughtfulness, played on it still, the way shadows
play on a face which is staring into the fire.
But I thought I'd never hear the end of that piano. At first, Isabel would write me, saying how
nice it was that Sonny was so serious about his music and how, as soon as he came in from
school, or wherever he had been when he was supposed to be at school, he went straight to
that piano and stayed there until suppertime. And, after supper, he went back to that piano
and stayed there until everybody went to bed. He was at the piano all day Saturday and all
day Sunday. Then he bought a record player and started playing records. He'd play one
record over and over again, all day long sometimes, and he'd improvise along with it on the
piano. Or he'd play one section of the record, one chord, one change, one progression, then
he'd do it on the piano. Then back to the record. Then back to the piano.
Well, I really don't know how they stood it. Isabel finally confessed that it wasn't like living
with a person at all, it was like living with sound. And the sound didn't make any sense to
her, didn't make any sense to any of them- naturally. They began, in a way, to be afflicted by
this presence that was living in their home. It was as though Sonny were some sort of god, or
monster. He moved in an atmosphere which wasn't like theirs at all. They fed him and he
ate, he washed himself, he walked in and out of their door; he certainly wasn't nasty or
unpleasant or rude. Sonny isn't any of those things; but it was as though he were all
wrapped up in some cloud, some fire, some vision all his own; and there wasn't any way to
reach him.
At the same time, he wasn't really a man yet, he was still a child, and they had to watch out for him
in all kinds of ways. They certainly couldn't throw him out. Neither did they dare to make a great
scene about that piano because even they dimly sensed, as I sensed, from so many thousands of
miles away that Sonny was at that piano playing for his life.
But he hadn't been going to school. One day a letter came from the school board and
Isabel's mother got it-there had, apparently, been other letters but Sonny had torn them up.
This day, when Sonny came in, Isabel's mother showed him the letter and asked where he'd
been spending his time. And she finally got it out of him that he'd been down in Greenwich
Village, with musicians and other characters, in a white girls apartment. And this scared her
and she started to scream at him and what came up, once she began-though she denies it
to this day-was what sacrifices they were making to give Sonny a decent home and how little
he appreciated it.
Sonny didn't play the piano that day. By evening, Isabel's mother had calmed down but then
there was the old man to deal with, and Isabel herself. Isabel says she did her best to be
calm but she broke down and started crying. She says she just watched Sonny's face. She


could tell, by watching him, what was happening with him. And what was happening was that
they penetrated his cloud, they had reached him. Even if their fingers had been times more
gentle than human fingers ever are, he could hardly help feeling that they had stripped him
naked and were spitting on that nakedness. For he also had to see that his presence, that
music, which was life or death to him, had been torture for them and that they had endured
it, not at all for his sake but only for mine. And Sonny couldn't take that. He can take it a little
better today than he could then but he's still not very good at it and, frankly, I don't know
anybody who is.
The silence of the next few days must have been louder than the sound of all the music ever played
since time began. One morning, before she went to work, Isabel was in his room for something and
she suddenly realized that all of his records were gone. And she knew for certain that he was gone.
And he was. He went as far as the navy would carry him. He finally sent me a postcard from some
place in Greece and that was the first I knew that Sonny was still alive. I didn't see him any more
until we were both back in New York and the war had long been over.
He was a man by then, of course, but I wasn't willing to see it. He came by the house from
time to time, but we fought almost every time we met. I didn't like the way he carried
himself, loose and dreamlike all the time, and I didn't like his friends, and his music seemed
to be merely an excuse for the life he led. It sounded just that weird and disordered.
Then we had a fight, a pretty awful fight, and I didn't see him for months. By and by I looked
him up, where he was living, in a furnished room in the Village, and I tried to make it up. But
there were lots of other people in the room and Sonny just lay on his bed, and he wouldn't
come downstairs with me, and he treated these other people as though they were his family
and I weren't. So I got mad and then he got mad, and then I told him that he might just as
well be dead as live the way he was living. Then he stood up and he told me not to worry
about him any more in life, that he was dead as far as I was concerned. Then he pushed me
to the door and the other people looked on as though nothing were happening, and he slammed the
door behind me. I stood in the hallway, staring at the door. I heard somebody laugh in the room and
then the tears came to my eyes. I started down the steps, whistling to keep from crying, I kept
whistling to myself. You going to need me, baby, one of these cold, rainy days.
I read about Sonny's trouble in the spring. Little Grace died in the fall. She was a beautiful
little girl. But she only lived a little over two years. She died of polio and she suffered. She
had a slight fever for a couple of days, but it didn't seem like anything and we just kept her
in bed. And we would certainly have called the doctor, but the fever dropped, she seemed to
be all right. So we thought it had just been a cold. Then, one day, she was up, playing, Isabel
was in the kitchen fixing lunch for the two boys when they'd come in from school, and she
heard Grace fall down in the living room. When you have a lot of children you don't always
start running when one of them falls, unless they start screaming or something. And, this
time, Gracie was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that when she heard that thump and then that
silence, something happened to her to make her afraid. And she ran to the living room and
there was little Grace on the floor, all twisted up, and the reason she hadn't screamed was
that she couldn't get her breath. And when she did scream, it was the worst sound, Isabel
says, that she'd ever heard in all her life, and she still hears it sometimes in her dreams.
Isabel will sometimes wake me up with a low, moaning, strangling sound and I have to be
quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me seems a
mortal wound.


I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was buried. I was sitting in the
living room in the dark, by myself, and I suddenly thought of Sonny. My trouble made his
real.
One Saturday afternoon, when Sonny had been living with us, or anyway, been in our house,
for nearly two weeks, I found myself wandering aimlessly about the living room, drinking
from a can of beer, and trying to work up courage to search Sonny's room. He was out, he
was usually out whenever I was home, and Isabel had taken the children to see their
grandparents. Suddenly I was standing still in front of the living room window, watching
Seventh Avenue. The idea of searching Sonny's room made me still. I scarcely dared to
admit to myself what I'd be searching for. I didn't know what I'd do if I found it. Or if I didn't.
On the sidewalk across from me, near the entrance to a barbecue joint, some people were
holding an old-fashioned revival meeting. The barbecue cook, wearing a dirty white apron,
his conked hair reddish and metallic in the pale sun, and a cigarette between his lips, stood
in the doorway, watching them. Kids and older people paused in their errands and stood
there, along with some older men and a couple of very tough-looking women who watched
everything that happened on the avenue, as though they owned it, or were maybe owned by
it. Well, they were watching this, too. The revival was being carried on by three sisters in
black, and a brother. All they had were their voices and their Bibles and a tambourine. The
brother was testifying and while he testified two of the sisters stood together, seeming to
say, amen, and the third sister walked around with the tambourine outstretched and a
couple of people dropped coins into it. Then the brother's testimony ended and the sister
who had been taking up the collection dumped the coins into her palm and transferred them
to the pocket of her long black robe. Then she raised both hands, striking the tambourine against
the air, and then against one hand, and she started to sing. And the two other sisters and the brother
joined in.
It was strange, suddenly, to watch, though I had been seeing these meetings all my life. So,
of course, had everybody else down there. Yet, they paused and watched and listened and I
stood still at the window. "'Tis the old ship of Zion," they sang, and the sister with the
tambourine kept a steady, jangling beat, "it has rescued many a thousand!" Not a soul under
the sound of their voices was hearing this song for the first time, not one of them had been
rescued. Nor had they seen much in the way of rescue work being done around them.
Neither did they especially believe in the holiness of the three sisters and the brother, they
knew too much about them, knew where they lived, and how. The woman with the
tambourine, whose voice dominated the air, whose face was bright with joy, was divided by
very little from the woman who stood watching her, a cigarette between her heavy, chapped
lips, her hair a cuckoo's nest, her face scarred and swollen from many beatings, and her
black eyes glittering like coal. Perhaps they both knew this, which was why, when, as rarely,
they addressed each other, they addressed each other as Sister. As the singing filled the air
the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something within;
the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away
from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first
condition, while dreaming of their last. The barbecue cook half shook his head and smiled,
and dropped his cigarette and disappeared into his joint. A man fumbled in his pockets for
change and stood holding it in his hand impatiently, as though he had just remembered a
pressing appointment further up the avenue. He looked furious. Then I saw Sonny, standing


on the edge of the crowd. He was carrying a wide, flat notebook with a green cover, and it
made him look, from where I was standing, almost like a schoolboy. The coppery sun
brought out the copper in his skin, he was very faintly smiling, standing very still. Then the
singing stopped, the tambourine turned into a collection plate again. The furious man
dropped in his coins and vanished, so did a couple of the women, and Sonny dropped some
change in the plate, looking directly at the woman with a little smile. He started across the
avenue, toward the house. He has a slow, loping walk, something like the way Harlem
hipsters walk, only he's imposed on this his own half-beat. I had never really noticed it
before.
I stayed at the window, both relieved and apprehensive. As Sonny disappeared from my sight, they
began singing again. And they were still singing when his key turned in the lock.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey, yourself. You want some beer?"
"No. Well, maybe." But he came up to the window and stood beside me, looking out. "What a warm
voice," he said.
They were singing If I could only hear my mother pray again!
"Yes," I said, "and she can sure beat that tambourine."
"But what a terrible song," he said, and laughed. He dropped his notebook on the sofa and
disappeared into the kitchen. "Where's Isabel and the kids?"
"I think they want to see their grandparents. You hungry?"
"No." He came back into the living room with his can of beer. "You want to come some place with
me tonight?"
I sensed, I don't know how, that I couldn't possibly say no. "Sure. Where?"
He sat down on the sofa and picked up his notebook and started leafing through it. "I'm going to sit
in with some fellows in a joint in the Village."
"You mean, you're going to play, tonight?"
"That's right." He took a swallow of his beer and moved back to the window. He gave me a sidelong
look. "If you can stand it."
"I'll try," I said.
He smiled to himself and we both watched as the meeting across the way broke up. The three sisters
and the brother, heads bowed, were singing God be with you till we meet again. The faces around
them were very quiet. Then the song ended. The small crowd dispersed. We watched the three
women and the lone man walk slowly up the avenue.
"When she was singing before," said Sonny, abruptly, "her voice reminded me for a minute of what
heroin feels like sometimes-when it's in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the
same time. And distant. And- and sure." He sipped his beer, very deliberately not looking at me. I
watched his face. "It makes you feel-in control. Sometimes you've got to have that feeling."
"Do you?" I sat down slowly in the easy chair.
"Sometimes." He went to the sofa and picked up his notebook again. "Some people do." "In order,"
I asked, "to play?" And my voice was very ugly, full of contempt and anger.
"Well"-he looked at me with great, troubled eyes, as though, in fact, he hoped his eyes would tell me
things he could never otherwise say-"they think so. And if they think so-!"
"And what do you think?" I asked.
He sat on the sofa and put his can of beer on the floor. "I don't know," he said, and I couldn't be
sure if he were answering my question or pursuing his thoughts. His face didn't tell me.


"It's not so much to play. It's to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level." He frowned and
smiled: "In order to keep from shaking to pieces."
"But these friends of yours," I said, "they seem to shake themselves to pieces pretty goddamn fast."
"Maybe." He played with the notebook. And something told me that I should curb my tongue, that
Sonny was doing his best to talk, that I should listen. "But of course you only know the ones that've
gone to pieces. Some don't-or at least they haven't yet and that's just about all any of us can say." He
paused. "And then there are some who just live, really, in hell, and they know it and they see what's
happening and they go right on. I don't know." He sighed, dropped the notebook, folded his arms.
"Some guys, you can tell from the way they play, they on something all the time. And you can see
that, well, it makes something real for them. But of course," he picked up his beer from the floor
and sipped it and put the can down again, "they want to, too, you've got to see that. Even some of
them that say they don't- some, not all."
"And what about you?" I asked-I couldn't help it. "What about you? Do you want to?"
He stood up and walked to the window and I remained silent for a long time. Then he sighed. "Me,"
he said. Then: "While I was downstairs before, on my way here, listening to that woman sing, it
struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through-to sing like that. It's
repulsive to think you have to suffer that much."
I said: "But there's no way not to suffer-is there. Sonny?"
"I believe not," he said and smiled, "but that's never stopped anyone from trying." He looked at me.
"Has it?" I realized, with this mocking look, that there stood between us, forever, beyond the power
of time or forgiveness, the fact that I had held silence-so long!-when he had needed human speech
to help him. He turned back to the window. "No, there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds
of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem-well, like you. Like
you did something, all right, and now you're suffering for it. You know?" I said nothing. "Well you
know," he said, impatiently, "why do people suffer? Maybe it's better to do something to give it a
reason, any reason."
"But we just agreed," I said, "that there's no way not to suffer. Isn't it better, then, just to-take it?"
"But nobody just takes it," Sonny cried, "that's what I'm telling you! Everybody tries not to.
You're just hung up on the way some people try-it's not your way!" The hair on my face began to
itch, my face felt wet. "That's not true," I said, "that's not true. I don't give a damn what other
people do, I don't even care how they suffer. I just care how you suffer." And he looked at me.
"Please believe me," I said, "I don't want to see you-die- trying not to suffer."
"I won't," he said flatly, "die trying not to suffer. At least, not any faster than anybody else."
"But there's no need," I said, trying to laugh, "is there? in killing yourself."
I wanted to say more, but I couldn't. I wanted to talk about will power and how life could be- well,
beautiful. I wanted to say that it was all within; but was it? or, rather, wasn't that exactly the trouble?
And I wanted to promise that I would never fail him again. But it would all have sounded-empty
words and lies.
So I made the promise to myself and prayed that I would keep it. "It's terrible sometimes, inside,"
he said, "that's what's the trouble. You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there's not
really a living ass to talk to, and there's nothing shaking, and there's no way of getting it out- that
storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it
and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen."
And then he walked away from the window and sat on the sofa again, as though all the wind had
suddenly been knocked out of him. "Sometimes you'll do anything to play, even cut your mother's


throat." He laughed and looked at me. "Or your brother's." Then he sobered. "Or your own." Then:
"Don't worry. I'm all right now and I think I'll be all right. But I can't forget- where I've been. I
don't mean just the physical place I've been, I mean where I've been. And what I've been."
"What have you been, Sonny?" I asked.
He smiled-but sat sideways on the sofa, his elbow resting on the back, his fingers playing with his
mouth and chin, not looking at me. "I've been something I didn't recognize, didn't know I could be.
Didn't know anybody could be." He stopped, looking inward, looking helplessly young, looking old.
"I'm not talking about it now because I feel guilty or anything like that-maybe it would be better if I
did, I don't know. Anyway, I can't really talk about it. Not to you, not to anybody," and now he
turned and faced me. "Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of the world,
I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play or I didn't really have to play, it just
came out of me, it was there. And I don't know how I played, thinking about it now, but I know I
did awful things, those times, sometimes, to people. Or it wasn't that I did anything to them-it was
that they weren't real." He picked up the beer can; it was empty; he rolled it between his palms:
"And other times-well, I needed a fix, I needed to find a place to lean, I needed to clear a space to
listen-and I couldn't find it, and I-went crazy, I did terrible things to me, I was terrible for me." He
began pressing the beer can between his hands, I watched the metal begin to give. It glittered, as he
played with it like a knife, and I was afraid he would cut himself, but I said nothing. "Oh well. I can
never tell you. I was all by myself at the bottom of something, stinking and sweating and crying and
shaking, and I smelled it, you know? my stink, and I thought I'd die if I couldn't get away from it
and yet, all the same, I knew that everything I was doing was just locking me in with it. And I didn't
know," he paused, still flattening the beer can, "I didn't know, I still don't know, something kept
telling me that maybe it was good to smell your own stink, but I didn't think that that was what I'd
been trying to do- and-who can stand it?" and he abruptly dropped the ruined beer can, looking at
me with a small, still smile, and then rose, walking to the window as though it were the lodestone
rock. I watched his face, he watched the avenue. "I couldn't tell you when Mama died-but the reason
I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from drugs. And then, when I ran away, that's
what I was running from-really. When I came back, nothing had changed I hadn't changed I was
just-older." And he stopped, drumming with his fingers on the windowpane. The sun had vanished,
soon darkness would fall. I watched his face. "It can come again," he said, almost as though speaking
to himself. Then he turned to me. "It can come again," he repeated. "I just want you to know that."
"All right," I said, at last. "So it can come again. All right."
He smiled, but the smile was sorrowful. "I had to try to tell you," he said.
"Yes," I said. "I understand that."
"You're my brother," he said, looking straight at me, and not smiling at all.
"Yes," I repeated, "yes. I understand that."
He turned back to the window, looking out. "All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred
and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart."
We went to the only nightclub on a short, dark street, downtown. We squeezed through the narrow,
chattering, jampacked bar to the entrance of the big room, where the bandstand was. And we stood
there for a moment for the lights were very dim in this room and we couldn't see. Then, "Hello, boy
" said the voice and an enormous black man, much older than Sonny or myself, erupted out of all
that atmospheric lighting and put an arm around Sonny's shoulder. "I been sitting right here," he
said, "waiting for you."
He had a big voice, too, and heads in the darkness turned toward us.


Sonny grinned and pulled a little away, and said, "Creole, this is my brother. I told you about him."
Creole shook my hand. "I'm glad to meet you, son," he said and it was clear that he was glad to meet
me there, for Sonny's sake. And he smiled, "You got a real musician in your family," and he took his
arm from Sonny's shoulder and slapped him, lightly, affectionately, with the back of his hand.
"Well. Now I've heard it all," said a voice behind us. This was another musician, and a friend of
Sonny's, a coal-black, cheerful-looking man built close to the ground. He immediately began
confiding to me, at the top of his lungs, the most terrible things about Sonny, his teeth gleaming like
a lighthouse and his laugh coming up out of him like the beginning of an earthquake. And it turned
out that everyone at the bar knew Sonny, or almost everyone- some were musicians, working there,
or nearby, or not working, some were simply hangers- on, and some were there to hear Sonny play. I
was introduced to all of them and they were all very polite to me. Yet, it was clear that, for them I
was only Sonny's brother. Here, I was in Sonny's world. Or, rather: his kingdom. Here, it was not
even a question that his veins bore royal blood.
They were going to play soon and Creole installed me, by myself, at a table in a dark corner. Then I
watched them, Creole, and the little black man and Sonny, and the others, while they horsed around,
standing just below the bandstand. The light from the bandstand spilled just a little short of them
and watching them laughing and gesturing and moving about, I had the feeling that they,
nevertheless, were being most careful not to step into that circle of light too suddenly; that if they
moved into the light too suddenly, without thinking, they would perish in flame. Then, while I
watched, one of them, the small black man, moved into the light and crossed the bandstand and
started fooling around with his drums. Then-being funny and being, also, extremely ceremonious-
Creole took Sonny by the arm and led him to the piano. A woman's voice called Sonny's name and a
few hands started clapping. And Sonny, also being funny and being ceremonious, and so touched, I
think, that he could have cried, but neither hiding it nor showing it, riding it like a man, grinned, and
put both hands to his heart and bowed from the waist. Creole then went to the bass fiddle and a
lean, very bright-skinned brown man jumped up on the bandstand and picked up his horn. So there
they were, and the atmosphere on the bandstand and in the room began to change and tighten.
Someone stepped up to the microphone and announced them. Then there were all kinds of
murmurs. Some people at the bar shushed others. The waitress ran around, frantically getting in the
last orders, guys and chicks got closer to each other, and the lights on the bandstand, on the quartet,
turned to a kind of indigo. Then they all looked different there. Creole looked about him for the last
time, as though he were making certain that all his chickens were in the coop, and then he jumped
and struck the fiddle. And there they were.
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare
occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear
corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is
hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it
hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words,
and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just
watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had
the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and
pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all
back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the
fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He
was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the


deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing-he had
been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things
on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.
And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never
before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He
has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it
to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and
big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to
try; to try and make it do everything.
And Sonny hadn't been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn't on much better terms with his
life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one way, got
scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have
found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And the face I saw on Sonny I'd never seen before.
Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being
burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there.
Yet, watching Creole's face as they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling that something
had happened, something I hadn't heard. Then they finished, there was scattered applause, and then,
without an instant's warning, Creole started into something else, it was almost sardonic, it was Am I
Blue? And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And
Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said something awful on the drums, Creole
answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached
perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and
old. Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from
his face. He seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It
seemed that he couldn't get over it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to
be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit
something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened,
apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were
not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin,
destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of
how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be
heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. And this tale,
according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every
country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these
are Sonny's blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man
on the horn. Creole wasn't trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him
Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that
Sonny speak for himself.
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed
to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others.
And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening
phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and
it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning
we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I


understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free
until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would
continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we
knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that,
passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time,
how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road
where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I
saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was
yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that
trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
Then it was over. Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning.
There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I
asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up
there in the indigo light and after awhile I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the
piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he
sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano.
For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head like
the very cup of trembling.


Harrison Bergeron
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and
the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was
better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this
equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the
unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy
by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and
Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly
average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And
George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear.
He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every
twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George
from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten
for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no
better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags
of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a
pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that
maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in
his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.


Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest
sound had been.
"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.
"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious.
"All the things they think up."
"Um," said George.
"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of
fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon
Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes.
Kind of in honor of religion."
"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.
"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."
"Good as anybody else," said George.
"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.
"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail,
about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red
eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can
rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of
birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a
little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."
George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's
just a part of me."
"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make
a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."
"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't
call that a bargain."


"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't
compete with anybody around here. You just set around."
"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon
we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You
wouldn't like that, would you?"
"I'd hate it," said Hazel.
"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens
to society?"
If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied
one. A siren was going off in his head.
"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.
"What would?" said George blankly.
"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?
"Who knows?" said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to
what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech
impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say,
"Ladies and Gentlemen."
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best
he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."
"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily
beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest
and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-
hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use.
Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again,
making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where
he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is
under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."


A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways,
upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a
background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier
handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a
little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with
thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him
whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to
the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of
life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a
nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth
random.
"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of
Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an
earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the
time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be
Harrison!"
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his
head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing
Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the
uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers
cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I
say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man
who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"


Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to
support five thousand pounds.
Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar
snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first
woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with
marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance?
Music!" he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too.
"Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians
from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed
them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though
synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would
soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.


They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below
the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a
double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead
before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had
ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen
for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat
down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."
"What was it?" he said.
"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.
"Forget sad things," said George.
"I always do," said Hazel.
"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.
"You can say that again," said George.
"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."


The Utterly Perfect Murder
Ray Bradbury

It was such an utterly perfect, such an incredibly delightful idea for murder, that I was half
out of my mind all across America.
The idea had come to me for some reason on my forty-eighth birthday. Why it hadn't come
to me when I was thirty or forty, I cannot say. Perhaps those were good years and I sailed through
them unaware of time and clocks and the gathering of frost at my temples or the look of the lion
about my eyes.
Anyway, on my forty-eighth birthday, lying in bed that night beside my wife, with my
children sleeping through all the other quiet moonlit rooms of my house, I thought:
I will arise and go now and kill Ralph Underhill.
Ralph Underhill I cried, who is he?
Thirty-six years later, kill him? For what?
Why, I thought, for what he did to me when I was twelve.
My wife woke, an hour later, hearing a noise.
"Doug?" she called. "What are you doing?"
"Packing," I said. "For a journey."
"Oh," she murmured, and rolled over and went to sleep.
"Board! All aboard!" the porter's cries went down the train platform.
The train shuddered and banged.
"See you!" I cried, leaping up the steps.
"Someday," called my wife, "I wish you'd fly!"
Fly? I thought, and spoil thinking about murder all across the plains? Spoil oiling the pistol
and loading it and thinking of Ralph Underhill's face when I show up thirty-six years late to settle
old scores? Fly? Why, I would rather pack cross-country on foot, pausing by night to build fires and
fry my bile and sour spit and eat again my old, mummified but still-living antagonisms and touch
those bruises which have never healed. Fly?!
The train moved. My wife was gone.
I rode off into the Past.
Crossing Kansas the second night, we hit a beaut of a thunderstorm. I stayed up until four in
the morning, listening to the rave of winds and thunders. At the height of the storm, I saw my face,
a darkroom negative-print on the cold window glass, and thought:
Where is that fool going?
To kill Ralph Underhill!
Why? Because!
Remember how he hit my arm? Bruises. I was covered with bruises, both arms; dark blue,
mottled black, strange yellow bruises. Hit and run, that was Ralph, hit and run
And yet . . . you loved him?
Yes, as boys love boys when boys are eight, ten, twelve, and the world is innocent and boys
are evil beyond evil because they know what they do, but do it anyway. So, on some secret level, I
had to be hurt. We dear fine friends needed each other. I to be hit. He to strike. My scars were the
emblem and symbol of our love.
What else makes you want to murder Ralph so late in time?


The train whistle shrieked. Night country rolled by.
And I recalled one spring when I came to school in a new tweed knicker suit and Ralph
knocking me down, rolling me in snow and fresh brown mud. And Ralph laughing and me going
home, shamefaced, covered with slime, afraid of a beating, to put on fresh dry clothes.
Yes! And what else?
Remember those toy clay statues you longed to collect from the Tarzan radio show? Statues
of Tarzan and Kala the Ape and Nurna the Lion,' for just twenty-five cents?! Yes, yes! Beautiful!
Even now, in memory, 0 the sound of the Ape man swinging through green jungles far away,
ululating!' But who had twenty-five cents in the middle of the Great Depression? No one.
Except Ralph Underhill.
And one day Ralph asked you if you wanted one of the statues.
Wanted! you cried. Yes! Yes!
That was the same week your brother in a strange seizure of love mixed with contempt gave
you his old, but expensive, baseball-catcher's mitt.
"Well," said Ralph, "I'll give you my extra Tarzan statue if you'll give me that catcher's mitt."
Fool! I thought. The statue's worth twenty-five cents. The glove cost two dollars! No fair!
Don't!
But I raced back to Ralph's house with the glove and gave it to him and he, smiling a worse
contempt than my brother's, handed me the Tarzan statue and, bursting with joy, I ran home.
My brother didn't find out about his catcher's mitt and the statue for two weeks, and when
he did he ditched me when we hiked out in farm country and left me lost because I was such a sap.
"Tarzan statues! Baseball mitts!" he cried. "That's the last thing I ever give you!"
And somewhere on a country road I just lay down and wept and wanted to die but didn't
know how to give up the final vomit that was my miserable ghost.
The thunder murmured.
The rain fell on the cold Pullman-car windows.
What else? Is that the list?
No. One final thing, more terrible than all the rest.
In all the years you went to Ralph's house to toss up small bits of gravel on his Fourth of
July six-in-the-morning fresh dewy window or to call him forth for the arrival of dawn circuses in
the cold fresh blue railroad stations in late June or late August, in all those years, never once did
Ralph run to your house.
Never once in all the years did he, or anyone else, prove their friendship by coming by. The
door never knocked. The window of your bedroom never faintly clattered and belled with a high-
tossed confetti of small dusts and rocks.
And you always knew that the day you stopped going to Ralph's house, calling up in the
morn, that would be the day your friendship ended.
You tested it once. You stayed away for a whole week. Ralph never called. It was as if you
had died, and no one came to your funeral.
When you saw Ralph at school, there was no surprise, no query, not even the faintest lint of
curiosity to be picked off your coat. Where were you, Doug? I need someone to beat. Where you
been, Doug, I got no one to pinch?
Add all the sins up. But especially think on the last:
He never came to my house. He never sang up to my early-morning bed or tossed a wedding
rice of gravel on the clear panes to call me down to joy and summer days.


And for this last thing, Ralph Underhill, I thought, sitting in the train at four in the morning,
as the storm faded, and I found tears in my eyes, for this last and final thing, for that I shall kill you
tomorrow night.
Murder, I thought, after thirty-six years. Why, you're madder than Ahab.
The train wailed. We ran crosscountry like a mechanical Greek Fate carried by a black metal
Roman Fury.
They say you can't go home again.
That is a lie.
If you are lucky and time it right, you arrive at sunset when the old town is filled with yellow
light.
I got off the train and walked up through Green Town and looked at the courthouse,
burning with sunset light. Every tree was hung with gold doubloons of color. Every roof and coping
and bit of gingerbread was purest brass and ancient gold.
I sat in the courthouse square with dogs and old men until the sun had set and Green Town
was dark. I wanted to savor Ralph Underhill's death.
No one in history had ever done a crime like this.
I would stay, kill, depart, a stranger among strangers.
How would anyone dare to say, finding Ralph Underhill's body on his doorstep, that a boy
aged twelve, arriving on a kind of Time Machine train, traveled out of hideous self-contempt, had
gunned down the Past? It was beyond all reason. I was safe in my pure insanity.
Finally, at eight-thirty on this cool October night, I walked across town, past the ravine.
I never doubted Ralph would still be there.
People do, after all, move away. . . .
I turned down Park Street and walked two hundred yards to a single streetlamp and looked
across. Ralph Underhill's white two-story Victorian house waited for me.
And I could feel him in it.
He was there, forty-eight years old, even as I felt myself here, forty-eight, and full of an old
and tired and self-devouring spirit.
I stepped out of the light, opened my suitcase, put the pistol in my right-hand coat pocket,
shut the case, and hid it in the bushes where, later, I would grab it and walk down
into the ravine and across town to the train.
I walked across the street and stood before his house and it was the same house I had stood
before thirty-six years ago. There were the windows upon which I had buried those spring bouquets
of rock in love and total giving. There were the sidewalks, spotted with firecracker burn marks from
ancient July Fourths when Ralph and I had just blown up the whole damned world, shrieking
celebrations.
I walked up on the porch and saw on the mailbox in small letters: UNDERHILL.
What if his wife answers?
No, I thought, he himself, with absolute Greek-tragic perfection, will open the door and take
the wound and almost gladly die for old crimes and minor sins somehow grown to crimes.
I rang the bell.
Will he know me, I wondered, after all this time? In the instant before the first shot, tell him
your name. He must know who it is.
Silence.
I rang the bell again.


The doorknob rattled.
I touched the pistol in my pocket, my heart hammering, but did not take it out.
The door opened.
Ralph Underhill stood there.
He blinked, gazing out at me.
"Ralph?" I said.
"Yes?" he said.
We stood there, riven, for what could not have been more than five seconds. But many
things happened in those five swift seconds.
I saw Ralph Underhill.
I saw him clearly.
And I had not seen him since I was twelve.
Then, he had towered over me to pummel and beat and scream.
Now he was a little old man.
I am five foot eleven.
But Ralph Underhill had not grown much from his twelfth year on.
The man who stood before me was no more than five feet two inches tall.
I towered over him.
I gasped. I stared. I saw more.
I was forty-eight years old.
But Ralph Underhill, forty-eight, had lost most of his hair, and what remained was
threadbare gray, black and white. He looked sixty or sixty-five.
I was in good health.
Ralph Underhill was waxen pale. There was a knowledge of sickness in his face. e had
traveled in some sunless land. He had a ravaged and sunk look. His breath smelled of funeral
flowers.
All this, perceived, was like the storm of night before, gathering all its lightnings and
thunders into one bright concussion. We stood in the explosion.
So this is what I came for? I thought. This then, is the truth. This dreadful instant in time.
Not to pull out the weapon. Not to kill. No, no. But simply
To see Ralph Underhill as he is in this hour.
That's all.
Just to be here, stand here, and look at him as he has become.
Ralph Underhill lifted one hand in a kind of gesturing wonder. His lips trembled. His eyes
flew up and down my body, his mind measured this giant who shadowed his door. At last his voice,
so small, so frail, blurted out:
"Doug?"
I recoiled.
"Doug?" he gasped, "is that you?"
I hadn't expected that. People don't remember! They can't! Across the years? Why would he
know, bother, summon up, recognize, call?
I had a wild thought that what had happened to Ralph Underhill was that after I left town,
half of his life had collapsed. I had been the center of his world, someone to attack, beat, pummel,
bruise. His whole life had cracked by my simple act of walking away thirty-six years ago.


Nonsense! Yet, some small crazed mouse of wisdom scuttered about my brain and
screeched what it knew: You needed Ralph, but, more! He needed you! And you did the only
unforgivable, the wounding, thing! You vanished.
"Doug?" he said again, for I was silent there on the porch with my hands at my sides. "Is
that you?"
This was the moment I had come for.
At some secret blood level, I had always known I would not use the weapon. I had
brought it with me, yes, but Time had gotten here before me, and age, and smaller, more terrible
deaths....
Bang.
Six shots through the heart.
But I didn't use the pistol. I only whispered the sound of the shots with my mouth. With
each whisper, Ralph Underhill's face aged another ten years. By the time I reached the last shot he
was one hundred and. ten years old.
"Bang," I whispered. "Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang."
His body shook with the impact.
"You're dead. Oh, God, Ralph, you're dead."
I turned and walked down the steps and reached the street before he called:
"Doug, is that you?"
I did not answer, walking.
"Answer me?" he cried, weakly. "Doug! Doug Spaulding, is that you? Who is that? Who are
you?"
I got my suitcase and walked down into the cricket night and darkness of the ravine and
across the bridge and up the stairs, going away.
"Who is that?" I heard his voice wail a last time.
A long way off, I looked back.
All the lights were on all over Ralph Underhill's house. It was as if he had gone around and
put them all on after I left.
On the other side of the ravine I stopped on the lawn in front of the house where I had
been born.
Then I picked up a few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my
life.
I tossed the few bits of gravel up to tap that window where I had lain every morning of my
first twelve years. I called my own name. I called me down in friendship to play in some long
summer that no longer was.
I stood waiting just long enough for my other young self to come down to join me.
Then swiftly, fleeing ahead of the dawn, we ran out of Green Town and back, thank you,
dear Christ, back toward Now and Today for the rest of my life.



XX. Literature and Composition Exam:
The Prose Passage Essay C Test



Literature and Composition Exam: The Prose Passage
Essay

A. PRE-EXAM

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROSE PASSAGE ESSAY
This section of the exam gives you an opportunity to read and analyze a prose piece of literature. This is your chance to
become personally involved in the text and to demonstrate your literary skills.

What is an Literature prose passage?
Generally, it is a one-page excerpt from a work of fiction or nonfiction. More often than not, the selection will be from a
novel or short story. The nonfiction selection may include essays, biographies, autobiographies, and articles from
periodicals.

What is the purpose in writing an essay about a prose piece?
First, the people at the College Board want to determine your facility in reading and interpreting a sustained piece of
literature. It requires you to understand the text and to analyze those techniques and devices the author uses to achieve
his or her purpose.

Second, the exam is designed to allow you to demonstrate your ease and fluency with terminology, interpretation, and
criticism. Also, the level of your writing should be a direct reflection of your critical thinking.

Third, the xam determines your ability to make connections between analysis and interpretation. For example, when you
find a metaphor, you should identify and connect it to the author's intended purpose or meaning. You should not just
list items as you locate them. You must connect them to your interpretation.

TYPES OF PROSE PASSAGE ESSAY QUESTIONS
Let's look at a few prose passage questions that have been asked on the Literature exam in the past:

Analyze narrative and literary techniques and other resources of language used for characterization.
How does a narrator reveal character? (i.e., tone, diction, syntax, point of view)
How does the author reveal a character's predicament? (i.e., diction, imagery, point of view)
Explain the effect of the passage on the reader.
Compare/contrast two passages concerning diction and details for effect on reader.
How does the passage provide characterization and evaluation of one character over another? (i.e., diction,
syntax, imagery, tone)
What is the attitude of the speaker toward a particular subject?
Analyze the effect of revision when given both the original and the revised version of a text.
Analyze style and tone and how they are used to explore the author's attitudes toward his or her subject.
How is the reader prepared for the conclusion of the piece?

You should he prepared to write an essay based on any of these prompts.

Tip: Don't he thrown by the complexity of a passage. Generally, the more difficult the reading, the more basic the question. You choose the
references you wish to incorporate into your essay. So, even if you haven't understood everything, you are still able to write an intelligent essay
as long as you address the prompt and refer to the parts of the passage you do understand.
Watch out for overconfidence when you see what you believe to he an easy question with an easy passage. You are going to have to work extra
hard to find the nuances in the text that will allow you to write a mature essay.

RATING THE PROSE PASSAGE ESSAY
You will be relieved to know that the rating of your essay is not based on whether or not the reader likes you or agrees
with your point-of-view.


How do the test readers evaluate my essay?
It's important to understand just what it is that goes into rating your essay. This is called a rubric, but don't let that word
throw you. A rubric is a word that simply refers to the rating standards that are set and used by the people who read the
essays. These standards are fairly consistent, no matter what the prompt might be. The primary change is in the citing of
the specifics in a particular prompt.

Be assured that experienced readers of the English Exams are trained to reward those things you do well in addressing
the question. They are not looking to punish you. They are aware of the time constraints, and they read your essay just as
your own instructor would read the first draft of an essay you wrote on a 40-minute exam. These readers look forward
to an interesting, insightful, and well-constructed essay.
So, let's take a look at the following rubrics:

A 9 essay has all the qualities of an 8 essay, and the writing style is especially impressive, as is the analysis and/or
discussion of the specifics related to the prompt and the text.
An 8 essay will effectively and cohesively address the prompt. It will analyze and/or discuss the stylistic elements called
for in the question. And it will do so using appropriate evidence from the given text. The essay will also show the
writer's ability to control language well.
A 7 essay has all the properties of a 6, only with a more complete and well-developed analysis/discussion or a more
mature writing style.
A 6 essay adequately addresses the prompt. The analysis and/or discussion is on target and makes use of appropriate
specifics from the text. However, these elements are less fully developed than scores in the 7, 8, and 9 range. The essay
writer's ideas are expressed with clarity, but the writing may have a few errors in syntax and/or diction.
A 5 essay demonstrates that the writer understands the prompt. The analysis/discussion is generally understandable, but
the analysis/ discussion is limited or uneven. The writer's ideas are expressed clearly with a few errors in syntax or
diction.
A 4 essay is not an adequate response to the prompt. The writer's analysis/discussion of the text indicates a
misunderstanding, an over-simplification, or a misrepresentation of the given passage. The writer may use evidence that
is not appropriate or not sufficient to support the analysis/discussion.
A 3 essay_ is a lower 4 because it is even less effective in addressing the prompt. It is also less mature in its syntax and
organization.
A 2 essay indicates little success in speaking to the prompt. The writer may misread the question, only summarize the
passage, never develop the required analysis/discussion, or simply ignore the prompt and write about another topic
altogether. The writing may also lack organization and control of language and syntax. (Note: No matter how good a
summary may be, it will never rate more than a 2.)
A 1 essay is a lower 2 because it is even more simplistic, disorganized, and lacking in control of language.
Tip: Remember, this essay is really a first draft. The test readers know this and approach each essay with this in mind.

TIMING THE ESSAY
Remember, timing is crucial. With that in mind, here's a workable strategy:

13 minutes reading and "working the prompt."
5 minutes reading and making marginal notes about the passage. Try to isolate 2 quotations that strike you.
This may give you your opening and closing.
10 minutes preparing to write. (Choose one or two of the following methods that you feel comfortable with.)
a. Highlighting
b. Marginal notations
c. Charts or key word/one word/line number outlining
20 minutes to write your essay, based on your preparation.
3 minutes for proofreading.

WORKING THE PROMPT
You can't write clearly unless you know Why you are writing and What's Expected of you. When you "Work the
Prompt," you are maximizing both of these areas.


How should I go about reading the prose prompt?
Plan to spend 13 minutes carefully reading the question. This will give you time to really digest what the question is
asking you to do.

Tip: In the margin, note what time you should he finished with this essay. For example, the test starts at 1 p.m. You write 1:40 in the
margin. Time to move on.

Here are three reasons why you should do a 13 minute careful analysis of the prompt.
1. Once you know what is expected, you will read in a more directed manner.
2. Once you internalize the question, you will be sensitive to those details that will apply.
3. Once you know all the facets that need to he addressed, you will be able to write a complete essay demonstrating
adherence to the topic.

Tip: Topic adherence, which means sticking to the question, is a key strategy for achieving a high score.

Highlight, circle, or underline the essential terms and elements in the prompt.

Note: When the question uses the expression "such as," you are not required to use only those ideas presented; you are
free to use your own selection of techniques and devices. Notice that the prompt requires more than one technique. One
will not he enough. You must use more than one. If you fail to use more than one technique, no matter how well you
present your answer, your essay will he incomplete.

READING AND NOTATING THE PROSE PASSAGE
Depending on your style and comfort level, choose one of these approaches to your reading:

1. A. Read quickly to get the gist of the passage.
B. Reread, using the highlighting and marginal notes approach.
2. A. Read slowly, using highlighting and making marginal notes.
B. Reread to confirm that you understand the full impact of the passage.

Note: In both approaches, you must highlight and make marginal notes. There is no way to avoid this. Ignore what you
don't immediately understand. It may become clear to you after you finish reading the passage. Practice. Practice.
Concentrate on those parts of the passage that apply to what you highlighted in the prompt.

There are many ways to read and interpret any given passage. You have to choose which one to use and which specifics
to include for sup-port. Don't be rattled if there is leftover material.



Summative Assessment

Read the complete short story below carefully, and then write an essay in which you show how the author uses
literary devices to achieve her purpose.

The Birthday Party
By: Katherine Brush

They were a couple in their late thirties, and they looked unmistakably married. They sat on the banquette opposite us in
a little narrow restaurant, having dinner. The man had a round, self-satisfied face, with glasses on it; the woman was
fadingly pretty, in a big hat. There was nothing conspicuous about them, nothing particularly noticeable, until the end of
their meal, when it suddenly became obvious that this was an occasionin fact, the husband's birthday. And the wife
had planned a little surprise for him.
It arrived, in the form of a small but glossy birthday cake, with one pink candle burning in the center. The headwaiter
brought it in and placed it before the husband, and meanwhile the violin-and-piano orchestra played "Happy Birthday to
You" and the wife beamed with shy pride over her little surprise, and such few people as there were in the restaurant
tried to help out with a pattering of applause. It became clear at once that help was needed, because the husband was not
pleased. Instead he was hotly embarrassed, and indignant at his wife for embarrassing him.
You looked at him and you saw this and you thought, "Oh, now don't be like that!" But he was like that, and as soon as
the little cake had been deposited on the table, and the orchestra had finished the birthday piece, and the general
attention had shifted from the man and the woman, I saw him say something to her under his breathsome punishing
thing, quick and curt and unkind. I couldn't bear to look at the woman then, so I stared at my plate and waited for quite
a long time. Not long enough, though. She was still crying when I finally glanced over there again. Crying quietly and
heartbrokenly and hopelessly, all to herself, under the gay big brim of her best hat.



XXI. Appendix I: Literary Analysis Papers -
Successful Student Examples

Adapted from: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/midtermexamples.htm
Copyright 1997-2003, Cora Agatucci, Professor of English



Josie Fenner
ENG 104, Prof. C. Agatucci
Midterm Literary Analysis Paper
29 October 2003
The Lord of the Rings
Some stories can affect people emotionally, but once in a while a story can
call a person to escape to it. The Lord of the Rings is an enchanting story
with masterful use of setting and sensational characters that engages readers
and can move them to experience life in a deeper way. As a child, J.R.R.
Tolkien lived in Africa until his father passed away. Then his mother moved
them to England. Mrs. Tolkien made certain that her children learned
literature and languages. It was probably due somewhat to his mothers
influence that Tolkien became who he was: an author and a linguist (Corday).
Tolkien had a special interest in "obscure" languages, even to the point of
creating his own. He called it High-Elven and often in his stories he used
the language. Tolkien also invented an entire world called Middle Earth where
The Lord of the Rings takes place. Because he had invented this world it had
to bow to his will and rules. He was an accomplished linguist and this
greatly helped his ability to vividly portray and create in the readers mind
Middle Earth, a place that no person has ever been (Corday).
Charters defines setting as "the place and time of the story." Also according
to Charters, "When the writer locates the narrative in a physical setting,
the reader is moved along step by step toward acceptance of the fiction"
(Charters 1008).
Tolkiens setting gives the reader a sense of goodness or malevolence. Unlike
an environment that is removed from the work, Tolkiens setting sometimes is


the story. Possibly the setting could even tell the story if there were no
characters. For example, in the house of Elrond of the elves, Frodo's
experience is defined by the setting. "He [Frodo] found his friends sitting
in a porch on the side of the house looking east. Shadows had fallen in the
valley below, but there was still a light on the faces of the mountains far
above. The air was warm. The sound of running and falling water was loud, and
the evening was filled with a faint scent of trees and flowers, as if summer
still lingered in Elronds gardens (220).
This describes a peaceful place that is not quite reality. The rest of the
world is moving into winter, but Elronds gardens havent realized that yet.
Next, is another example of how Tolkien uses setting to create a picture that
could not be obtained by just explaining the scenery. Tolkien is able to
bring a place to life with words. We can see this when the Fellowship winds
up going through the Mines of Moria.
The Company spent that night in the great cavernous hall, huddled close
together in a corner to escape the draught: there seemed to be a steady
inflow of chill air through the eastern archway. All about them as they lay
hung the darkness, hollow and immense, and they were oppressed by the
loneliness and vastness of the dolven halls and endlessly branching stairs
and passages. The wildest imaginings that dark rumor had ever suggested to
the hobbits fell altogether short of the actual dread and wonder of Moria
(307).
This description is one of dread and fear, but like the experience at
Elronds house, it is filled with word pictures. It tells the reader that
this place is terrible and that some evil is afoot.
Of course Tolkien received criticism as all writers do. For instance, Burton
Raffel takes the opinion that "his [Tolkien's] descriptions often fail to


create sense impressions needed to make language more deeply felt and more
deeply worked." Raffel also claimed that "Tolkiens nature descriptions are
frequently somewhat overwrought..." (20).
Still, I maintain that Tolkiens extraordinary ability to paint a picture
with words takes the reader into a place theyve never been and still manages
to keep them following the story. The characters that Tolkien artfully
created, accent the setting and bring them further to life. This is an
attribute to a great setting. Charters explains that "setting must also have
a dramatic use. It must be shown, or at least felt, to affect character or
plot" (Charters 1008). All through The Lord of the Rings the setting is
imposing feelings onto the characters (e.g. fear, dread, peacefulness).
Charters describes characters in literature as "the people who make something
happen or produce an effect," and explains that the "characters must come
alive" (Charters 1006-1007). Tolkien received criticism on his characters by
Raffel as well. Raffel feels that there is "too little meaningful truth about
human reality and our own existences in Tolkiens characters." Kathryn
Crabbe seems to disagree with this statement. In her efforts to describe the
characters as heroic she also shows us they have some very modern human
characteristics. Crabbe says that Frodo is "neither stronger than most men,
nor braver than most...He is selfless in his love for his companions." If
there is not enough "meaningful truth about human reality" in Tolkiens
writing, then maybe it is because he portrays a picture of ordinary people at
their best. The heroes in The Lord of the Rings do not succumb to evil. They
do not inadvertently get caught doing good. They are selfless. Isnt this
exactly humanity at its best?
Middle Earth is a place where the spirituality of a person is closely
connected to the reality of the person. Tolkiens characters are not mere


people. Each has a position and job in the universe as well, something to
make them heroic and larger than life-right down to Sam whose purpose it
would seem is to guard and protect his "master". This is evident throughout
the books but especially at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring when Sam,
now understanding just what might lie ahead, insists on going with Frodo
(397). The characters show that not just anyone is able to complete this
quest. It requires a specific person for each job. For example, there is a
reason that Tom Bombadil cannot take the Ring even though he is impervious to
its power (259). Fate has chosen Frodo. In so doing Tolkien creates a story
that even the average person can relate to. It propels people to see the
possibilities of greatness amongst the commoners and restores our hope in the
great ones. Almost anyone can find at least one hero among the fellowship.
One of the things that makes The Lord of the Rings so compelling is the way
the setting and characters work together to produce the ultimate affect. The
characters make the setting even more potent. As the external setting
influences each character the reader sees how the struggle becomes internal.
We are led to believe that the characters are closely connected to the earth.
The diversity of the setting and characters simply propels us to see the
uniqueness of each place. Where a group of caves might give us one thought,
hearing Gimli discuss the majesty of his cave experience helps us to
appreciate the diversity of the group and to see it through a cave dwellers
eyes. "These are not holes," said Gimli. "This is the great realm and city of
the Dwarrowdelf. And of old it was not darksome, but full of light and
splendour, as is still remembered in our songs"(307).
The Lord of the Rings is essentially a story about the struggle of good
verses evil. The setting helps the story personify the difficulties the
characters face. The characters go through the trials and share their


feelings of fear and triumph with us. The two work together to make an
excellent portrayal of external and internal struggles that yield an
otherwise impossible effect.
Works Cited
Charters, Ann, ed. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short
Fiction. Compact 6th ed.
Boston: Bedford-St. Martins, 2003.
Corday, Alina. "Master of Middle Earth." Smithsonian 32.10 (Jan. 2002): 76
(6pp). Rpt.
EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, 2002: Article No. 5749860.
Crabbe, Katharyn W. "The Quest as Legend: The Lord of the Rings." (Originally
published in
J.R.R. Tolkien. Revised and Expanded Edition, by Katharyn W. Crabbe.
City: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co., 1988.) Rpt. J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the
Rings. Modern Critical
Interpretations Series. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea
House, 2000. 141-170.
Rpt. Cora's Online Reserve, restricted access.
Raffel, Burton. "The Lord of the Rings as Literature." (Originally published
in Tolkien and the
Critics: Essays of J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings. Ed. Neil
D. Isaacs and Rose A.
Zimbardo. Univ. Of Notre Dame Press, 1968.) Rpt. J. R. R. Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings.
Modern Critical Interpretations Series. Ed. Harold Bloom.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000.


17-35. Rpt. Cora's Online Reserve, restricted access.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring, being the first part of The Lord
of the Rings. [Rev.
ed. 1966.] Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1994.

2003, Josie Fenner


Tonya Flowers
29 October 2003
Chopins Artistry in The Story of an Hour

To be in conflict with traditional societys beliefs is difficult for many to
do; however, author Kate Chopin fights that battle to bring readers some of
the most thought provoking literature that a person can get their hands on.
Using to her advantage conventions of narrative stories such as character
development, plot control, and irony, she is able to bring the reader into a
world of emotions that society would scoff at. Kate Chopin demonstrates her
incredible literary talent in The Story of an Hour by interconnecting the
plot and character development, with her use of thought-provoking vocabulary
and narrative irony.
Kate Chopins literary talent would have never been so strongly
founded if it was not for the circumstances surrounding her life and
upbringing. Her father died when she was only four years old, which left her
mother and grandmother to raise, and shape her desires and ideologies
(Charters 156). Having been raised primarily by strong willed feminine role
models, Chopin developed a taste for more of an unconventional role for women
in society. In her home town of St. Louis, she became know as the towns
Littlest Rebel (Davis). She was widowed and left with six children to bring
up on her own (Charters 156). This situation developed more of her strong
will to write about the passion and strength that women have. Much of her
writing portrays women in their relations with men, children and their own
sexuality (Charters 156). Her writing is classified in the literary movement


know as Realism. The Realism movement took place in the 19th century
(Agatucci 4). Realism is based on everyday events, slice of life stories
that depict ordinary people dealing with society and its forces on living
(Agatucci 3). Realistic writing is characterized with everyday events, social
controversy, and protagonist/antagonist interactions (Agatucci 3). There is
often and ironic undertone to Realism, as is evident in The Story of an
Hour (Agatucci 3). All of the characteristics of the Realism movement
mentioned are active in this story. An example of Realism in The Story of
an Hour is evident when Mrs. Mallards sister reveals to her the tragic
news: It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled
hints that revealed in half concealing (Chopin 157). This brings out the
slice of life quality of Realism because it is a display of how most people
would break the news of a shocking death. Chopin enjoyed life and believed
that real fiction was and is life (Chopin 861). Although she felt like a
literary outcast, her frankness and honest look at women and their emotions
is what makes The Story of an Hour and her other works literary jewels in
our society today.
Chopin does a great job at integrating two of the conventions of
narrative fiction, plot and character development. The plot of a story is
the sequence of events in a story and their relation to one another as they
develop and usually resolve a conflict (Charters2 1003). Within the plot of
narrative stories there is an exposition, rise to action, climax, and a fall
from action. The character development is the other convention that enables
Chopin to write this thought provoking story. Character is what stays with
you after you have finished reading it. The action of the plot is performed
by the characters in the story, the people who make something happen or
produce an effect (Charters2 1006). Chopin uses her character development to


enhance the plot in order to bring the reader closer to the emotions of the
story. In The Story of an Hour both of these elements are vitally
interconnected to each other.
The plot itself is taking place primarily in the mind of Mrs. Mallard, which
makes imperative that the reader understands her personality and where
thoughts are derived from. First Mrs. Mallard is described as having heart
trouble, and being a tender woman (Chopin 157). This is important to the plot
because it explains why her sister took great care to break the news to her.
She is also described as being young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines
bespoke repression and even a certain strength (Chopin 157). This is a key
piece of information in understanding why she grieves only momentarily.
According to Websters Dictionary repression means: to prevent the natural
or normal expression, activity or development of; a process by which
unacceptable desires or impulses are excluded from consciousness and left to
operate in the unconscious (Webster 527). Mrs. Mallards marriage did not
allow her to express herself through any venue of release with the exception
of her unconscious. She was never allowed to be normal with her emotions
or, to show or use her true strength, but instead had to suppress them. One
can also see that in the plot, Mrs. Mallard resists the liberation she feels
at first because of her characteristic trait of being weak, and is unable or
powerless to resist them (Chopin 157). As the feeling of freedom sets in her
mind she begins to describe herself as a goddess of Victory (Chopin 158).
A goddess is a female of exceptional charm beauty, or grace (Webster 294).
Mrs. Mallard began, for the first time in her marriage, to feel beautiful and
charming in light of her victory over the battle of wills that she had been
oppressed by. In the story she gets her first chance to show off her new
found strength and beauty when she lets her sister in to see the triumph in


her eyes (Chopin 158). The mix of character development and plot is not
only evident in the case of main character, but is also found briefly in the
case if Mr. Mallard. Chopin writes There would be no powerful will bending
hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a
right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a
cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime (Chopin 158). This is the
only glimpse that the reader gets into Bentley Mallards character; however
there is much revealed through this passage. He was controlling, forcing his
will on her. He was powerful (in contrast to her being powerless) and blind
to the fact that he was hurting his wife. The other minor characters are left
to the imagination of the reader because they do not play major roles within
the plot.
A fundamental characteristic of Realism is its use of irony. Chopin plays
with irony to bring surprise to the climax, as well as enhance the depth of
the story. Sara Davis has this to say: The Story of an Hour turns on a
series of artful modulated ironies that culminate in a somewhat contrived
ending (Davis). There are several examples of this, first off that of
Brentleys friend Richard takes the time to confirm his name with a second
telegram, and then at the end of the story it turns out that he is not even
involved in the accident (Chopin 157). Another example of irony is this:
Her pulse beat fast, and then the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every
inch of her body (Chopin 158). In this sentence it is ironic that it was
blood, the symbolic representation of life, that was fueling her, and then at
the end her life ceases. Another ironic point is made within Mrs. Mallards
thought process: She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was
only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long
(Chopin 158).Her prayer was answered, and when she found out she immediately


had a fatal heart attack. In addition to this irony of life and death, the
reader is faced with yet another and maybe the strongest use of irony in this
short story, and that is the use of the word joy. It is first used in Mrs.
Mallards thoughts as a monstrous joy of being free from bondage, and
tasting the elixir of life that is now so precious to her (Chopin 158).
Secondly it is used by the doctors in the last line who naively state that
she died of heart diseaseof joy that kills (Chopin 158). It is ironic that
it was not joy of seeing Mr. Mallard alive that killed her, but that of the
terrible loss that she would never feel the monstrous joy she had felt
before. Kate Chopin did produce an excellent example of Realism literature
with her use of irony in this story.
Chopin does not allow her use of irony as her only tool to enhance the
dynamics of The Story of an Hour. She also incorporates a variety of tools
such as metaphors, narrative style, and thought provoking vocabulary that
bring this story to life. Mrs. Mallard is described as having heart trouble
(Chopin 157). One could argue that her heart trouble was not that of a
physical condition, but of an emotional and psychological condition derived
from such a difficult marriage. Chopin also uses a wide array of descriptive
words to bring to life the feelings that Mrs. Mallard is having about the
death of her husband. Examples of this are seen throughout the text: new
spring life delicious breath of air blue sky showing through the clouds
drinking in a very elixir of life summer days etc. (Chopin 157-158).
Chopin also uses the metaphor of an open window that she sits Mrs. Mallard in
front of during the rise of the plot. The window is not just part of the
setting, but a window into the heart and mind of the main character. It was
her access to new life, new excitement, and new hopes of the coming years
without Brentlys overpowering will on her. Jennifer Hicks brings out another


point of narrative eloquence by stating that Chopin elaborates upon this
when the narrator says that Mrs. Mallard would have no one follow her.
While the implication is that she would have no one follow her to her room,
the reader wonders in hindsight whether Mrs. Mallard might have meant also
that she would have no one interfere with her new life again (Hicks). Kate
Chopin used all of these tools to her advantage to bring the world a
controversial look at a womans emotions.
It took many years after this story was written for its popularity to grow
into what it is today. In The Story of an Hour Kate Chopin interconnects
the plot, characters, irony, and narrative eloquence to produce a literary
product that is arguably priceless in our society today. Fred Lewis Patte
says in A History of American Literature that since 1870 the strength of
Chopins work come from what may be described as a native aptitude for
narration amounting almost to genius (Hicks). Readers of the future look
forward to see if her genius in this work will stand the test of time.
Works Cited
Agatucci, Cora. Emergence of the Short Story. Printed 10/14/03.
<http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/shortstory.htm>.
Charters, Ann. Kate Chopin. [header note]. The Story and its Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston:
Bedford, St. Martins, 2003. 156.
Charters, Ann. The Elements of Fiction. The Story and its Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston:
Bedford, St. Martins, 2003. 1003-1015.
Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour. [First published 1894] Rpt. The Story
and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed Ann Charters. Compact
6th ed. Boston: Bedford, St. Martins, 2003. 157-158.


Chopin, Kate. How I stumbled upon Maupassant. [1896]. Rpt. The Story and
its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed Ann Charters. Compact 6th
ed. Boston: Bedford, St. Martins, 2003. 861-862.
Davis, Sara de Saussure. Kate Chopin, February 8, 1851-August 22, 1904.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 12: American Realist and Naturalist.
A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Ed. Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert. Detroit:
Gale, 1982. 59-71 Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center [online subscription
database]. The Gale Group, 2002.
Hicks, Jennifer. An Overview of The Story of an Hour'. Short Stories for
Students. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center
[online subscription database]. The Gale Group, 2002.
Webster. Websters Dictionary and Thesaurus Deluxe Edition. Nichols
Publishing Group 2001. Imprinted of Allied Publishing Group, Inc. 294, 527.

2003, Tonya Flowers



Melanie Price
29 October 2003
Impressions of Ordinary Life

One of the sweet comforts in life is curling up in a favorite chair
with a short story that will carry us away from our everyday lives for an
hour or two. On rare occasions, we find a tale that mirrors real life in
such a way that we are strangely comforted by the normalcy reflected in the
words. A perfect example of a story about ordinary life that will soothe the
soul in search for some insight on understanding human behavior is Anton
Chekhovs The Lady with the Little Dog. This piece is definitive of the
literary period of realism during the late nineteenth century that was
influenced by this brilliant writer and others such as Guy de Maupassant and
Kate Chopin. This style of writing has such a mass appeal because the
characters in [these] novels (and in short stories) wear recognizable social
masks and reflect an everyday reality (Charters 997). In his simple
anecdote of a chance meeting between a middle-aged, chauvinistic, repeat-
offender adulterer, unhappily married man, and a young, nave, in-search-of-
something-new, married woman, Chekhov paints a picture that gives a startling
representation of how these two characters are influenced by the settings in
which their chronicle takes place, especially with the budding of their
relationship.
The narrative takes place in Yalta, a vacation spot for Eastern
Europeans and Russians on the northern coast of the Black Sea. We are given
a brief description of the main character, Gurov, who is a man that describes


his wife as a woman none too bright, narrow-minded, graceless, (Chekhov
144) and has used these human imperfections as reasons to be unfaithful. We
learn only minute details about his children and his employment, with more
emphasis being given to his views on women, an inferior race (Chekhov 144),
which are no doubt due to the sour experiences he has had in his extramarital
affairs. We can use this information and the fact that Yalta is a place
where one would go to search out a quick, fleeting liaison (Chekhov 144) to
assess that this man is in Yalta looking for just that. As soon as Gurov
gains sight of his prospective candidate and makes first contact with the
lady with the little dog (Chekhov 144), the scenery begins to take shape and
the setting is cheerful and airy, full of beautiful colors and tranquil
light. After becoming acquainted, Anna and Gurov strolled and talked of how
strange the light was on the sea; the water was of a lilac color, so soft and
warm, and over it the moon cast a golden strip (Chekhov 145). Later, when
he is alone in his hotel room, Gurov reflects on her slender, weak neck, her
beautiful gray eyes (Chekhov 145) and his thoughts reveal that he has
determined this young, vulnerable woman to be an ideal contender for another
one of his many affairs that he just cant help becoming involved in. As the
story unfolds, we see how the color gray is an integral component in the sort
of comfortable, yet, unresolved feeling that the relationship between Gurov
and Anna emanates.
When things are heating up between the two lonely travelers, so is
the weather, which is stuffy, but outside the dust flew in whirls (Chekhov
146) and their thirst is unrelenting no matter what they eat or drink to
quench it. There was no escape (Chekhov 146), seemingly, from the desire
for one another that is beginning to blossom. On this particular evening, the
couple makes way for the jetty to watch the incoming ship. A crowd of people


has gathered with many bouquets of flowers to greet arrivals. The churning
ocean echoes the intensity of their attraction for each other, along with the
mess of people surrounding them and Annas display of uneasiness and
absentmindedness. As the crowd thins out, the mood is calm and dark; the air
is full of the lingering scents of the flowers that are long gone with the
people and commotion. This becomes the optimal milieu for the couple to
surrender to their desires, free from the probing stares of the public.
Back in the hotel room, where it is again stuffy (Chekhov 146),
Gurov is reminded of his past experiences in many similar situations, and it
seems as though he may be fighting off the urge to run away from this
potentially, if not, inevitably, disastrous scene. Her features drooped and
faded, and her hair hung down sadly on both sides of her face, she sat
pondering in a dejected pose, like the sinful woman in a old painting
(Chekhov 147). Annas defenselessness is unappealing to Gurov, yet he is
detached from his emotions in such a way that he will not even consider the
prospect of the damage he could cause to this woman. Regardless of his
indifference, there is an inkling of the feelings he is already beginning to
have as he considers the solitary candle burning on the table barely lit up
her face, but it was clear that her heart was uneasy(Chekhov147). The
change from dark to light signals Gurov really does care for this woman and
is aware of his changing feelings, but he is far from learning to accept
this.
Once the relationship is consummated and Gurov is able to console
Anna, the lightheartedness returns to the scene, as if a dark cloud has been
lifted, and the two take off on an outing to Oreanda. The leaves of the
trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the
sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits


us (Chekhov 148). It is at this point when the reality of what they have
done sets in and the landscape begins to take on a resolute quality,
ostensibly validating the intricate feeling the two are experiencing
together. They are reminded of the fact that life goes on regardless of any
mistakes and if you thought of it, everything was beautiful in this world,
everything except for what we ourselves think and do when we forget the
higher goals of being and our human dignity (Chekhov 148). As Gurov
considers the unceasing movement of life on earth (Chekhov 148), the light
changes and in the glow of early dawn (Chekhov 148) the feeling is gray and
mystical, uncomplicated and convoluted all at the same time.
When Anna and Gurov have decidedly accepted their fate together,
the relationship swings into full force and the outings were successful,
their impressions each time were beautiful, majestic (Chekhov 148). And
then fate itself (Chekhov 148) makes a well-anticipated appearance, and the
lovers must part, most likely forever, and a moment later the noise could no
longer be heard, as if everything were conspiring on purpose to put a speedy
end to this sweet oblivion, this madness (Chekhov 149). With the brisk
winds of fall, Gurov is left alone on the train platform to contemplate his
worthiness of the nature of the feelings this woman has for him, he had
appeared to her not as he was in reality, and therefore he had involuntarily
deceived her (Chekhov 149).
Anton Chekhov is a master of portraying the complexities of the
human condition and the difficulties we all have with communication, both
inward and outward. The settings are artfully represented by imagery that
evokes real emotions in the reader who has gazed upon the landscape searching
for answers to lifes obstacles. Richard Ford describes Chekhov as a writer
for adults, his work becoming useful and also beautiful by attracting


attention to mature feelings, to complicated human responses and small issues
of moral choice within large, overarching dilemmas (Ford 868). There are
relationships in life that will change the very way in which we view our
surrounds and ourselves, and sometimes living vicariously through anothers
experience will inflict the same realizations. The Lady with the Little
Dog will give any reflective reader a delicious taste of life in perpetual
motion, the ongoing cycle of learning to live and accepting being human.
Works Cited
Charters, Ann. Appendix 2: A Brief History of the Short Story. The Story
and Its Writer: An Introduction
to Short Fiction. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,
2003. 995-1002.
Chekhov, Anton. The Lady with the Little Dog. [First published, 1899.]
Rpt. The Story and Its Writer:
An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,
2003. 143-155.
Ford, Richard. Why We Like Chekhov. [First published, 1998.] Rpt. The
Story and Its Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003.
869-873.

2003, Melanie Price



Arielle Samuel
26 October 2003

Plot and Character in Maupassants The Necklace

Lifeis composed of the most unpredictable, disparate, and
contradictory elements, according to Guy de Maupassant. It is brutal,
inconsequential, and disconnected, full of inexplicable, illogical
catastrophes (The Writers Goal" 897). Utterly to the point with his
words, Guy de Maupassants fame as a writer stemmed from his direct and
simple way of telling readers what he observed (Chopin 861). His short
story, The Necklace, is no exception. The Necklace is evidence of the
literary realism that dominated literature during the 19th century. Cora
Agatucci, a professor of Humanities, states that the subjects of literature
during this time period revolved around everyday events, lives, [and the]
relationships of middle/lower class people (Agatucci 2003). In The
Necklace, Maupassant describes an unhappy woman, born to a poor family and
married to a poor husband, who suffers ceaselessly from her lower-class
lifestyle, [] feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the
luxuries (Maupassant 524). Through the unfolding of the plot and the
exquisite characterization of Mathilde and her husband, Maupassant offers
readers a dramatic account of what could happen when a person is not
satisfied with her place in life.
Ann Charters defines plot as the sequence of events in a story
and their relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a


conflict (Charters 1003). According to Charters, there are five major parts
of a plot. The exposition explains the characters, the time period, and the
present situation; the rising action introduces a major complication, with
smaller conflicts occurring along the way; the climax, or the dramatic
turning point in the action of the story; the falling action, which helps
wrap up the major complication; and finally, the conclusion of the story
(Charters 1004-1005).
Plot plays a vital role in The Necklace, particularly the
exposition. Approximately one page is devoted entirely to Mathildes
description, a description of both her physical appearance as well as her
mentality, giving the readers a crystal clear picture of the main character
and the reasons behind her depression. Mathilde dressed plainly because she
could not dress well, but she was as unhappy as though she had really fallen
from her proper station, undoubtedly a station of wealth and prosperity in
her mind. Suffering from the poverty of her dwelling, Mathilde often
dreamt of silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, lit by tall
bronze candelabra when her own drab furniture and dreary walls angered her
to look at them (Maupassant 524). The exposition paints Mathilde as a woman
who feels shes been dealt a poor hand in life, a woman desiring riches far
beyond her grasp, which foreshadows the events to come later in the plot.
The action of the plot is performed by the characters in the
story, the people who make something happen or produce an effect (Charters
1006). Without the characters, the plot would be meaningless because the
characters bring the plot to life. Charters also explains that characters
can be one of two types: dynamic or static. A static character does not
change throughout the story; he or she just stays the same, while a dynamic
character is often described as round and often changes throughout the


course of the story (Charters 1007). The way an author chooses to develop a
character affects the entire story, particularly the climax. If a character
developed as a calm and level headed person, he or she will react wisely to
conflicts or emotional turning points; however, if a character is developed
as greedy and self absorbed, the climax of the story will cause the character
to make irrational choices in the face of conflict, as Mathilde, the dynamic
main character of The Necklace illustrates.
Mathildes character is consistently unhappy with her own life
and her own possessions, always longing for more than what she has. When her
husband brings home the invitation to the ball, hoping his wife will be
thrilled at the chance to attend such an exclusive gathering, she instead
threw the invitation on the table with disdain, because she had nothing to
wear. At her husbands suggestion of wearing her theater dress, she simply
cries with grief. When the dress dilemma is resolved, Mathilde is sad,
uneasy, [and] anxious (Maupassant 525). Her lack of fine jewelry and gems
makes her feel that she should almost rather not go at all (Maupassant
526). Clearly, Mathildes character is one with an insatiable greed for what
she does not have.
Later in the story, after the precious necklace has been lost,
Mathildes character appears to change, taking on the role of a poor woman
with heroism. As she is forced to scrub dishes, wash laundry, and bargain
with their miserable money, the reader would assume Mathilde has been
humbled by her greed and the price she paid for insisting on wearing the
diamond necklace. The reader questions the extent of Mathildes
transformation when Mathilde sits at her window and ponders the evening of
the ball, remembering her beauty and the attention she received.


Contrary to Mathilde is her husband, M. Loisel, a character who
remains static throughout the course of The Necklace. M. Loisel seems
happy with the small things in life, desiring only please his wife. When he
sits down to a supper of soup, he exclaims, Ah, the good pot-au-feu! I
dont know anything better than that (Maupassant 524). Meanwhile, Mathilde
is picturing food she feels she is worthy of, like the pink flesh of a trout
or the wings of a quail (Maupassant 524). M. Loisel does look his patience
once with his wife, saying to her, How stupid you are! (Maupassant 526)
when she is upset about her lack of jewelry. Other than that small episode,
M. Loisel remains fairly consistent throughout the length of the story.
The construction of the plot, such as the dramatic climax when
Mathilde realizes she has lost the necklace, combined with the shaping of the
two main characters, Mathilde and her husband, force the reader to realize
the unspoken theme of the story. Mathildes envy of other peoples
possessions leads to the eventual demise of her life, while her husbands
contentment with what he has allows him to remain essentially unchanged,
illustrates the theme running throughout the story, which is the importance
of being satisfied with who you are and what you have, as well as the
importance of not wanting or envying what others have. This theme becomes
obvious when, in the exposition, Mathildes perspective on her life makes her
seem poor and underprivileged; yet, when the Loisels are forced to make
drastic changes in their way of life, such as firing their maid and moving to
more economical lodging, the reader realizes the poverty Mathilde suffers
from is not poverty at all compared to the life they must lead after they are
forced to replace the diamond necklace.
Without a strong plot that envelops the reader in the ongoing
action, a story is not as powerful or effective; without good


characterization of the main characters, there is no mechanism for the plot
to unfold. If there is not an effective plot with identifiable characters,
the theme of any story is lost to the reader, so clearly the three go hand in
hand with each other. Maupassants ability to communicate facts and
descriptions, leaving the emotional interpretation for the reader, is what
hes known for. In fact, this ability makes the reader feel as though
Maupassant is telling the story for their ears and hearts only. Kate Chopin
eloquently wrote, I like to cherish the delusion that he has spoken to no
one else so directly, so intimately as he does to me (Chopin 862).
Works Cited
Agatucci, Cora (Professor of English, Humanities Dept., Central Oregon
Community
College). Emergence of the Short Story: Literary Romanticism and Realism-Poe
and Maupassant. Handout & In-Class Presentation, English 104: Introduction
to
Literature-Fiction, Central Oregon Community College [Bend, OR], Fall 2003.
Charters, Ann. The Elements of Fiction. [header note.] The Story and Its
Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,
2003. 1003-1015.
Charters, Ann. Guy de Maupassant [header note.] The Story and Its Writer:
An
2003. 523.
Chopin, Kate. How I Stumbled upon Maupassant. [First published 1969.] Rpt.
The
Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters.


Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 861-862.
Maupassant, Guy de. The Necklace. [First published 1884.] Rpt. The Story
and Its
Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 524-530.
Maupassant, Guy de. The Writers Goal. [First published 1888.] Rpt. The
Story and Its
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 896-898.


Matthew Welch
29 October 2003
The True Lord of the Rings
There is little doubt that J.R.R. Tolkien has become, in his
short reign within literary fiction, nothing short of legendary. His
stories, while only recently presented to the world, have ensnared and
enthralled thousands of readers around the world. While many cultured
critics still scoff at this work, the effect Tolkien has had on this world is
nearly as profound as the control he had over Middle Earth in his novels.
Tolkien, while certainly a master of all elements of fiction, displayed
unquestionable proficiency in the areas of character and setting.
Ann Charters defines character simply as, any person who plays a
part in a narrative (Charters 1045). Charters also defines flat characters
as those which are, simple, one-dimensional, unsurprising, and usually
unchanging, and round characters as those who are, complex, full, described
in detail, often contradictory, and usually dynamic, or changing (Charters
1045). The interesting part of Tolkiens work is that there are absolutely
no flat characters. The world of Middle Earth is changing and all the
creatures within it change as well. Tolkiens ability to control the fates
of the hundreds of characters in his novels may be the single most important
aspect of his novels. It is with these characters that readers identify, and
this identification moves the readers from a detached, on-looking
relationship to an involved, personal experience within the world Tolkien
creates.


His development of characters seems to focus on one main
character at a time, shifting from one to another. Specifically, Tolkien
shifts from Bilbo to Frodo Baggins. In developing those characters, much is
learned about the world and characters around them. In the first chapter of
Tolkiens, The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien introduces Bilbo Baggins and
seemingly focuses entirely on him. An observant reader will however notice
that they are given insight into the character of dozens of characters. For
instance, Ham Gamgee, The old Gaffer, tells other hobbits, Elves and
Dragons! I says to him. Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you
(Tolkien 24). When no one objects to this statement, readers are given
insight into the character of all hobbits. While Ham Gamgee may play only a
small part in the rest of this story, readers also learn about the background
of Sam Gamgee through this and other quotes from his father. It is this
background that gives Tolkiens characters the depths into which readers may
delve. By telling us not only what the character is like and how they change
throughout the story, but also why and how they became who they are, Tolkien
gives his readers a sense of personal attachment, as if they really know the
characters in the story.
Tolkien, while introducing minor parts, never fails to develop
their character. Even Radagast the Brown, a wizard who is mentioned briefly
on no more than two occasions is no exception to this rule. Tolkien tells
his readers where Radagast used to dwell and explains his relationship with
Gandalf, the only character with whom Radagast interacts (Tolkien 250).
Glorfindel, the Elf-Lord whos' horse Frodo rides across the ford to Elrond,
is a well developed character as Gandalf explains his nature and background
to Frodo after their arrival in the House of Elrond at Rivendell (Tolkien
217-218). Through these descriptions of all the characters in his novels,


Tolkien provides an emotional connection with Middle Earth and makes the
story seem less fiction and more like a dream in which readers are completely
immersed.
This immersion, while an exceptional accomplishment, is only one
part of what brings readers into Tolkiens world. The characterization makes
readers feel as if they actually know the creatures in the story, while the
setting makes readers feel as if they are walking alongside these characters
on their journey through Middle Earth. When these two are combined, readers
feel as if they become an integral part of the story.
In her essay, Master of Middle Earth, Alina Corday stated that Tolkiens,
penchant for perfectionism slowed his progress mightily while writing his
novels (Corday 3). She also mentions that Tolkien found it necessary to
learn how to stew a rabbit before including such an event in his novel
(Corday 3). This perfectionism is evidenced greatly in his development of
the setting. After the prologue and before the first chapter, Tolkien
includes a detailed map of The Shire. At the end of the novel, he includes
six additional maps, all of which are drawn in great detail and depict parts
of the world he has created. Charters defined setting as, The place and
time in which a storys action takes place (Charters 1051). This simple
definition is certainly fulfilled in nothing more than the maps and, perhaps,
a dozen pages of the novel. Charters does not, however, end her definition
there. She goes on to state that setting includes, the culture and ways of
life of the characters and the shared beliefs and assumptions that guide
their lives (Charters 1051). Tolkien even goes so far as to explain what
hobbits smoke in pipes, the history behind it, and where the best pipe weed
is grown (Tolkien 7-9).


As the story progresses, detailed descriptions are given of every
area through which the story takes us. In fact, Tolkien often presents
background on parts of the setting before they are formally introduced to his
readers. For instance, The Old Forest through which the Hobbits pass upon
leaving The Shire is discussed in detail before the party even decides to
travel through it. It is described as a dark, treacherous place, and is
obviously a place the Hobbits fear (Tolkien 104-109). Because they have this
background, readers are able to experience the feelings of apprehension,
surprise, and wonder in the same way the characters experience them.
In his obsession with perfection, Tolkien created an entirely new
world, complete with customs, languages, races, songs, and countries. He
also created a plethora of individuals through which his story is carried out
and with which his readers identify. While he created this world and
everything in it, he could not stray from the characters and lands he
created. Because of this, he had little control over the events once he set
them in motion. Tolkien, like the Lord of the Rings in the novel, had little
control over the actions that took place. He could only set obstacles and
helping hands before the characters and allow them to play out the story as
they would, as if they were, in fact, real people in a real world that began
in one mans mind and now exists in the minds and hearts of thousands of
readers throughout the world.
Works Cited
Charters, Ann. Appendix 5: Glossary of Literary Terms. The Story and its
Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Belford/St.
Martins 2003. 1044-1053.


Corday, Alina. Master of Middle Earth. Smithsonian 32.10 (Jan 2002): 76
(6pp). Rpt.
EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, 2002; Article No. 5749860.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring, Being the First Part of The Lord
of the Rings. [Rev. ed. 1966] Rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1994.

2003, Matthew Welch



Josh Goodall
4 November 2002
The Mystery of the Mastery
Much of life results from choices we make. How we meet every
circumstance, and also how we allow those circumstances to affect us dictates
our life. In Anton Chekhovs The Lady With the Little Dog," we are given a
chance to take a look inside two characters not unlike ourselves. As we are
given insight into these two people, their character and nature unfolds,
presenting us with people we can relate to. Even if we fail to grasp the
fullness of a feeling or circumstance, we are still touched on our own level,
evidencing the brilliance of Chekhovs writing.
In the exposition of the story, Chekhov immediately delves into
his character generation, introducing us to both Anna Sergeevna and Dmitri
Gurov, the main players in the story. He also gives us a physical
description of Anna, as well as a beginning presentation of Dmitris
character. Of Anna, Chekhov writes, a young woman, not very tall, blond,
in a beret, walking along the embankment; behind her ran a white spitz
(Chekhov 144). Of Dmitri he comments, Gurov, who had already spent two weeks
in Yaltabegan to take an interest in new faces (Chekhov 144). Chekhov
immediately offers a feel for how each character will shape up to be, and
presents a chance for us (the reader) to attach ourselves to these perhaps
not-so-unique individuals. Without further ado, Chekhov expounds on his
initial description of Dmitri through the next five paragraphs. We learn
that he is almost forty, has three children and a wife, but that he is not
happy at home. He married early, and is not in love with his wife. He


outwardly proclaims extreme chauvinism towards women, but we learn that in
the company of men he was bored, ill at ease, with them he was taciturn and
cold, but when he was among women, he felt himself free and knew what to talk
about with them and how to behave; and he was at ease even being silent with
them (Chekhov 144). Through this description, Dmitri gains a soul and
personality. He becomes a round, developed character with whom we can relate
and identify ourselves. Even if we are not completely like Dmitri, his
normal character helps us to identify ourselves with him in some way.
Chekhovs ability to define character and produce an effect in
the reader is not limited only to the description and action provided in the
story. He expertly weaves location and setting into the development of
theme. Setting is essential if the reader is to be given the opportunity to
glimpse a truth about the internal life from the characters and the plot
(Charters 1008). The story begins in Yalta, obviously in warmer weather,
which sets a happy tone for the exposition. However, once the couple meets,
the weather begins to change. A week had passed since they became
acquainted. It was Sunday. Inside it was stuffy, but outside the dust flew
in whirls, hats blew off (Chekhov 146). Chekhov illustrates how the
characters are developing through the change in the weather. In the
beginning, when the relationship is mostly superficial, the sun is shining,
and its a nice time for a stroll. However, as the adulterous relationship
continues, the weather become tumultuous, foreshadowing the turmoil that will
soon begin inside both Anna and Dmitri. After the lovers commit their
adulterous deeds, when they went out, there was not a soul on the
embankment, the town with its cypresses looked completely dead (Chekhov
147), indicating the death inside both the lovers. There is no turning back
at this point, and death may loom ahead. Through the environment the


characters live in, we learn what they are going through, and understanding
of the characters expand beyond mere words and actions.
The brilliance of Chekhovs writing cannot be overstated. In
The Lady with the Little Dog there is an untypical depth to the
relationship between Anna and Dmitri. While the plot itself may be little
more than that of a soap opera, the development and depth to which the
characters are taken is far beyond any afternoon television program. As
Richard Ford says, Chekhov concentrates [his] narrative attentions not on
the conventional hot spots sex, deceit, and what happens at the end but
rather, by its precision, pacing, and decisions about what to tell, it
directs our interest toward those flatter terrains of a love affair where we,
being conventional souls, might overlook something important (871). Sex,
lies, and deceit do take place, but they are all off stage. Chekhov takes
this critical time to develop character, showing us what is going on inside
the souls of the adulterers, rather than sensationalizing on the outside
events that are all too popular in todays society (as well as back when the
story was written).
Although Chekhovs story is filled with complex issues of moral
struggle and turmoil, it is a story we can all relate to. Everyone faces
difficult decisions in life, and Chekhov brings the inner mayhem to light.
Focus upon people rather than events impacts us in ways we cannot even
describe. We are connected to the people in the story as we identify with
the feelings and personalities of these fictional characters. Everything
that he [Gurov] found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was
sincere and did not deceive himself, which constituted the core of his life,
occurred in secret from others (Chekhov 154). We are forced to reflect
upon circumstances in our own lives, and all of lifes little nuances become


significant once we realize that they affect the fiber of our being. Chekhov
attracts attention to mature feelings, to complicated human dilemmas, any
part of which, were we to encounter them in our complex, headlong life with
others, might evade even sophisticated notice (Ford 869). We become more
sensitive to human interaction, and begin to empathize with others, beyond
the mere situation, and their deep inner struggles.
Without the brilliant illustration of Chekhovs characters, we
would miss much of the meaning of the story. The importance of being honest
with your feelings could be a theme in The Lady with the Little Dog. If
Chekhov did not produce such dynamic, realistic characters, we might be
insensitive to the true feelings of Anna and Dmitri. This character
development is essential to understanding of the theme. And only now, when
his head was gray, had he really fallen in love as one ought to for the
first time in his life (Chekhov 155). Chekhov tells the reader, Its not
too late. Even when [your] head [is] gray you can still find true love.
Once the reader has identified with the character, they begin to take the
practice (and success) of the character to bear in their own life. The theme
is fully digested, and creates inspiration in the reader to begin their own
quest for truth.
Works Cited
Charters, Ann, ed. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short
Fiction.
Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford-St. Martins, 2002.
Chekhov, Anton. The Lady with the Little Dog. Rpt. The Story and Its
Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston;


Ford, Richard. Why We Like Chekhov. Rpt. The Story and Its Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston;
2002, Josh Goodall



Christalyn Grantier
4 November 2002

Plot vs. Point of View in Chopin's "Story of An Hour"

Kate Chopins Story of an Hour tells the tale of an evolution
of a character in a single hour. Chopin accomplishes this by using a
specific point of view and unique plot to carry out her vision. These
elements work together to create a theme that has the greatest impact on the
reader.
Ann Charters defines point of view as the authors choice of
narrator for the story(1009). The Story of an Hour is told from the
viewpoint of a third-person narrator. This speaker is a non-participant in
the story (Charters 1009). Never does the narrator include herself in the
plot of Hour. Specifically, this speaker has only limited omniscience as
she relates the story. According to Charters, a speaker with limited
omniscience is able to know what is going on in the mind of a single
character, but not have a full understanding of, or chooses not to reveal to
the readers, the minds of all the characters (Charters 1009). For example,
the emotions and thoughts of Mrs. Mallard are fully described within the
story. We see her grief, but also the thoughts of freedom that begin to come
to her mind (Chopin 157-8). Because the narrator does not show all the
aspects of the story, it allows the fact of her husband being alive to be a
surprise (Chopin 158). The narrator, because he or she is not a member of
the story, may be able to be trusted more by the reader than a person


involved directly in the story (Charters 1010). The narrator is considered
more objective (Agatucci 4).
The author, Kate Chopin, was a great admirer of Guy de
Maupassant, a writer of the realist genre (Agatucci 4). Maupassant stated
that The writers goal is to reproduce this illusion of life faithfully
(Maupassant 898). Chopin used a point of view in Story of an Hour very
similar to that of Maupassant when he wrote The Necklace. The authors
factual account allows a reader to experience this illusion of life.
According to Maupassant, a writer should find a new way of looking at a
situation (Charters 523). Chopin, in attempting to imitate the genre
embraced by this author, looked at a situation of the death of a husband in a
unique way. She accomplished this by presenting the true feelings of a widow
and contrasting those feelings with societys beliefs. Working in the
realistic genre, Chopin presented a more disillusioned view of life
(Agatucci 4). Chopin did not portray the accepted norms of society. She did
not state that the wife could not go on without her husband. By contrast,
she viewed her story with a new concept, that of a wife feeling empowered to
go on living because her husband was no longer alive.
The thoughts and actions of these characters can be seen in the
development of the plot. Point of view is how a reader is able to look into
a story; the plot is the arrangement of the incidents themselves (Charter
1003, 1009). Charters defines plot as the sequence of events in a story and
their relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a
conflict(1003). The sequences within this story are quite short because
this story occurs in the course of a single hour. The conflict present in
this story is all within the protagonist, the main character of [the]
narrative (Charters 1051). Without the view which allows the reader to see


inside the mind of Mrs. Mallard, the reader would not be aware of the true
conflict. Without this insight, a reader might assume, like Mrs. Mallards
sister, that the conflict of the wife was the grief associated with her
husbands death (Chopin 158). The point of view allows the reader to see the
true conflict within the plot and to sense the freedom that is eventually
embraced by the protagonist (Chopin 158).
The life of the author seems to have an impact on the plot. Kate
Chopin had a very similar experience as Mrs. Mallard in the tragic death of
her father. Chopins father perished when she was young in a train accident
(Chopin 157; and Katherine Chopin). Also, she did not begin writing until
after her mother and husband had both passed away (Katherine Chopin). She
herself stated that If it were possible for my husband and my mother to come
back to earth, I feel that I would unhesitatingly give up every thing that
has come into my life since they left it and join my existence again with
theirs. To do that, I would have to forget the past ten years of my growth --
my real growth (O'Brien). This suggests Chopin sympathized with Mrs.
Mallard, who had found new freedom in the death of a loved one (Chopin 158).
Kate Chopin had a bicultural background. According to Contemporary Authors,
this authors great-grandmother related stories of her ancestors, including
those about notorious infidels (Katherine Chopin). This may have given
Chopin confidence to explore topics not generally discussed by the society of
her day.
The plot itself has some very distinct characteristics that are
of the literary realism genre. First, it is believable. Most people believe
that heart disease and train accidents do exist (Chopin 157). Authors
writing within this style often chose to look at the nature of human beings
(Agatucci 3). The entire plot of Story of An Hour is that of describing


the nature of the characters. The plot begins by depicting the reaction of
Mrs. Mallards sister and Mr. Mallards friend (Chopin 157). The evolution
of the emotional nature of Mrs. Mallard is described as she sits alone
(Chopin157-158). Finally, we see the nature of society at that time, totally
ignorant of the true feelings felt by the wife about her husband. Agatucci
describes this impact on characters such as Mrs. Mallard as ordinary people
of contemporary times live it in society, caught up by socialforces (3).
The social forces of this time included, what could be referred to as
societys repression of women. Seyersted describes this time period as a
society in which a society where man makes the rules, woman is often kept in
a state of tutelage and regarded as property or as a servant. Seyersted
quotes Chopin herself in saying, As Mme. de Stael's Corinne is told:
Whatever extraordinary gifts she may have, her duty and her proper destiny
is to devote herself to her husband and to the raising of her children.
This type of society had a great impact on the plot of this story. The
reader can better understand the situation of Mrs. Mallard. Her destiny was
that of devoting herself to her husband. Even though she loved him and would
weep upon seeing him dead, she welcomed the procession of years that would
belong to her absolutely (Chopin 158). Maureen Anderson refers to Chopin as
having an authorial skill through which she elegantly addresses society's
flaws present in all her works.
Both the point of view and the plot of Story of an Hour work to
create the theme of this story. Theme is a generalization about the meaning
of a story (Charters 1013). The theme of Chopins story is how ignorant
society was at that time of the true feelings experienced by repressed women.
First, the point of view allows us to see the inner emotions expressed by
Mrs. Mallard. Without a speaker with limited omniscience, a reader would


never realize what was truly being felt by the protagonist, and the theme
would be lost. Because the narrator is outside the story and could be
considered more objective, the reader is more likely to believe that these
feelings experienced by Mrs. Mallard are true. If Mrs. Mallard or the sister
had told the story, readers would have gotten two different, biased accounts.
The point of view allows a reader to feel that this really could have
happened, an illusion of life, thereby making the theme more powerful. The
plot allows Mrs. Mallard to explore her feelings of repression and finally
accept the fact that she can rejoice in the freedom of being a widow (Chopin
158). The surprise ending, the return of Mr. Mallard and the death of Mrs.
Mallard, gives the reader a chance to understand the ironic beliefs of
society (Chopin 158). The irony can be seen in the totally contradictory
feelings of the protagonist and society. Mrs. Mallard, upon seeing her
husband alive, was suddenly thrown back into a situation in which she had
thought with a shudder that life might be long (Chopin 158). It was this
great shock and grief that led to her death, not the joy that kills (Chopin
158).
Works Cited
Agatucci, Cora. (Professor of English, Humanities Dept., Central Oregon
Community College). Emergence of the Short Story: Literary Romanticism and
Realism- Poe and Maupassant; Myth Lit. Theory. In-Class Presentation,
English 104: Introduction to Literature-Fiction, Central Oregon Community
College [Bend, OR]. Fall 2002. Handout.
Anderson, Maureen. Unraveling the Southern Pastoral Tradition: A New Look at
Kate Chopin's At Fault. Southern Literary Journal 34.1: 1-14. Rpt. Ebsco
Host Academic Search Elite, 2001; Article No. 6124416.


Charters, Ann. Appendix 3: The Elements of Fiction. The Story and Its
Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th Edition. Boston:
Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour. [First published 1894.] Rpt. The Story
and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact
6th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 157-158.
Katherine Chopin, 1851-1904. [New Entry: 28 Apr. 1998.] Contemporary
Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center
[Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2002.
Maupassant, Guy de. The Writers Goal. [First published 1888.] Rpt. The
Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters.
Compact 6th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 896-898.
O'Brien, Sharon. Bored Wives and Jubilant Widows. The New York Times 30
Dec. 1990, late. ed., sec. 7: 10. Rpt. Lexis-Nexis. 28 Oct. 2002.
Seyersted, Per. [Excerpt from] Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Louisiana
State University Press, 1969. 246. Rpt. World Literature Criticism
Supplement, Vol.1. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription
Database]. The Gale Group, 2002.
2002, Christalyn Grantier


Jennifer Stewart
Revised Midterm Literary Analysis Paper
25 November 2002
2002, Jennifer Stewart
Literary Analysis of Maupassant's "The Necklace"
One of Guy De Maupassant's literary influences was Gustave
Flaubert, who taught him to write. Flaubert's teaching principles suggested
that the "writer must look at everything to find some aspect of it that no
one has yet seen or expressed," thus providing the reader a new or different
view of life (Charters, "Maupassant" header 523). Maupassant succeeded in
being a writer "who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through
his own being and with his own eyes," according to Kate Chopin (861). He
wrote "realistic fiction" and greatly influences writers still (Charters,
"Brief History" 998). "The Necklace" was written in the 19th century Literary
Realism period. The story focuses on "everyday events, lives, [and the]
relationships of middle/lower class," and it provides a glimpse of normal
people and how they are influenced by "social and economic forces" (Agatucci
4).
The meaning of "The Necklace" is developed through the depiction of the
characters and the plot of the story. Maupassant stated that the story is not
only a form of entertainment but a tool "to make us think and to make us
understand the deep and hidden meaning of events" ("Writer's" 896). I found
that the theme of "The Necklace" exhibits the importance of honesty and being
happy with who you are. It shows that things are not always what they seem,
material things do not define the person and that money cannot solve all
problems and may in fact create them. Donald Adamson describes the main


character, Mathilde, as a "poor but an honest woman," I disagree with his
opinion. Mathilde's dishonesty changes her life and forces her to know "the
horrible existence of the needy" (Maupassant 528). "The Necklace" is a story
about Mathilde, a miserable and selfish wife of a "little clerk" who suffers
"from the poverty of her dwelling," and dreams of a rich and elegant
lifestyle where she is beautiful and "envied" (Maupassant, "Necklace", 524).
This conflict within Mathilde drives her throughout the story. Her dedicated
husband, M. Loisel, is content with their life and wishes to make her happy
despite everything he must endure. After obtaining an invitation to a ball
that was an "awful trouble to get," he eagerly takes it home to his wife who
is ungrateful because she does not feel that she has anything suitable to
wear (525). After having a new dress made, Mathilde can't imagine going to
the ball without "a single jewel" so she borrows a beautiful necklace from
her friend Mme. Forestier (526). The day of the ball proved to be everything
Mathilde imagined, but it all ends when she loses the necklace. Although M.
Loisel and Mathilde find a replacement necklace, they spend "ten years in
grinding poverty until they finally paid off their debt," only to discover
that the necklace was not a diamond necklace but just "mere costume
jewellery" (Adamson).
Charters defines plot as the "sequence of events in a story and their
relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a conflict"
("Elements" 1003). In the exposition of "The Necklace," Maupassant provides a
detailed "character portrait" of Mathilde and offers some important details
about M. Loisel (Adamson). It is obvious that conflict exists inside of
Mathilde. She feels she is too good for the life she leads. She is unhappy
with who she is and dreams of being someone else. On the contrary, M. Loisel
is happy and satisfied to come home to his wife who prepares him an


"economical but tasty meal" (Smith). Mathilde is very materialistic and
believes that riches would end her suffering, she won't even visit a rich
friend and "former classmate at the convent" because she is so jealous and
envious.
The rising action of the plot begins when M. Loisel presents the invitation
to Mathilde. This presentation only aggravates the conflict that exists
within Mathilde and she cannot imagine going to the ball in any of her old
dresses. Mathilde sheds two pitiful tears and M. Loisel "quickly decides to
sacrifice his savings" so that she may purchase a new dress (Smith). Mathilde
is not satisfied with just a new dress! She believes it would be a disgrace
to show up at the ball without jewelry. She must not "look poor among other
women who are rich" (Maupassant 526). So she borrows a "superb necklace of
diamonds" from Mme. Forestier (526). In this passage Maupassant convinces the
reader that the necklace is real diamonds; "he misleads the reader into
believing that the necklace really is valuable" (Adamson). This creates more
excitement for the climax of the story when Mathilde loses the necklace on
her way home from the ball. M. Loisel responds by going to search for the
necklace to no avail. He does not find the necklace and instructs Mathilde to
lie to Mme. Forestier and tell her that she has broken the necklace and will
need time to have it repaired. If Mathilde would have chosen to be honest at
this point, Mme. Forestier would have told her that the necklace was only
"pasteworth at most five hundred francs" (530). Instead they find a
suitable replacement necklace that costs thirty-six thousand francs. After
one week M. Loisel "had aged five years," and was forced to use his
inheritance and borrow money "risking his signature without even knowing if
he could meet it" to buy the replacement necklace (Maupassant, "Necklace"
528). Upon returning the necklace to her friend, Mathilde discovered the


"horrible existence of the needy" (528). They "dismissed their servant" and
gave up their flat. Mathilde became a "woman of impoverished households -
strong and hard and rough" (529). She was forced to haggle and defend their
"miserable money" (529). It took them ten years to pay off all of their
debts. Mathilde was no longer pretty and charming, she now had "frowsy hair
and red hands" (529).
These trials and tribulations represent the falling action of the story,
where the conflict is moving toward a resolution (Charters, "Elements" 1005).
Guy De Maupassant's narrator and Donald Adamson use the term hero when
describing Mme. Loisel, but I do not feel that her actions were heroic. She
was just fulfilling the duties that were always expected of her, but that she
felt she was too good for. I do not believe that dishonesty is a trait of a
hero. Perhaps if Mathilde would have been honest with Mme. Forestier from the
beginning about losing the necklace, she would have explained that it was not
real diamonds and they could have avoided all of the hardships they endured.
Some may argue that Mathilde was heroic because she took responsibility for
her mistake, gave up her lifestyle and worked to repay the debt. It was
admirable that she did not expect her husband to bear the burden alone. The
conclusion of "The Necklace" undoubtedly contains an element of surprise.
Mathilde discovers that the necklace was not made of diamonds, but imitation
gems. This devastating discovery leaves many unanswered questions.
Maupassant's narrator uses limited omniscient narration by describing
Mathilde with her thoughts. She is a round character capable of choosing
alternative responses to the situations presented to her (Charters,
"Elements" 1007). I believe Mathilde is both a dynamic and a static
character. She is dynamic because she does undergo a significant change and
takes on the duties of a poverty stricken housewife. Yet she remains static


in that she is still not content with her life and dreams of that "gay
evening long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful" (Maupassant,
"Necklace" 529). Her husband M. Loisel is also a round character, the "play
and pull of his actions and responses to situations" could be observed
throughout the story (Charters, "Elements" 1007). When Mathilde is unhappy
with the invitation to the ball he offers to buy her a new dress. When she
wants jewelry he recommends borrowing from Mme. Forestier and when she loses
the necklace he collects the money to replace it. Although M. Loisel does
experience some change, he is a static character. I believe he is content and
happy with his life throughout the story. He continues to work hard and stays
dedicated to Mathilde. The themes of "The Necklace" are evident throughout
the plot of the story. If only Mathilde would have been honest with Mme.
Forestier and happy with who she was, she could have prevented the whole
ordeal. Her misfortune proves to the reader that honesty is the best choice.
Maupassant warns the reader of the afflictions that vanity may cause. There
was no need for Mathilde to wear a diamond necklace; she was too concerned
about what others would think of her. The fake diamond necklace proves that
things are not always what they seem, although Mme. Forestier appeared to be
rich, she chose or may have only been able to afford costume jewelry. I
believe "The Necklace" serves as a reminder of the importance of being happy
and proud of who we are regardless of the amount of material things or money
that we possess.
Works Cited
Adamson, Donald. ""The Necklace': Overview." Reference Guide to World
Literature. 2nd ed. Ed.
Lesley Henderson. St. James Press, 1995. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center
[Outline Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2002.


Community College). "Emergence of the Short Story: Literary Romanticism and
Realism - Poe and Maupassant; Myth Lit. Theory." Week #4 Presentation/Handout
Outline.
Charters, Ann. "Appendix 2: A Brief History of the Short Story." The Story
and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th ed. Boston:
Bedford-St. Martin's, 2003. 995-1002.
Charters, Ann. "Appendix 3: The Elements of Fiction." The Story and Its
Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford-St.
Martin's, 2003. 1003-1015.
Charters, Ann. "Guy De Maupassant" [header note]. The Story and Its Writer:
An Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford-St.
Martin's, 2003. 523.
Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction.
Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin's, 2003.
Chopin, Kate. "How I stumbled upon Maupassant." [First published 1896] Rpt.
The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters.
Compact Sixth ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003.
Maupassant, Guy De. "The Necklace." [First published 1884.] Rpt. The Story
and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact
Sixth ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. 524-530.
Maupassant, Guy De. "The Writer's Goal." [First published 1888.] Rpt. The
Story and Its Writer:An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters.
Compact Sixth ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. 896-898.
Smith, Christopher. "The Necklace': Overview." Reference Guide to Short
Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994. Rpt. Gale Literature
Resource Center [Online Subscription Database.] The Gale Group, 2002.


Ruzha Todorova
Literary Analysis Paper
4 November 2002
A Cure for Temporary Depression
The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story of a
young depressed woman, traveling to the country with her husband, so that she
can be away from writing, which seems to have a bad impact on her
psychological condition. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call it a striking
story of female confinement and escape, a paradigmatic tale which (like Jane
Eyre) seems to tell the story that all literary women would tell if they
could speak their speechless woe (874). In this story theme and point of
view interlace and work together to create an intense description of an
almost prison-like prescription for overcoming depression. She struggles with
male oppression, because she is told by her husband and her brother many
things about her own health that she disagrees with. She strives for
independence, and she wants to break free from the bondages of that
oppression. The story is written from the characters point of view in a form
resembling journal entries, which describe her stay in the house. The house
itself is an old mansion, and the yellow wallpaper in the characters bedroom
seems to be really disturbing. She believes that there is a woman locked
behind bars living in the pattern of that wallpaper. She spends a lot of time
trying to figure it out, and in the end she completely breaks away even from
her own mind.
Ann Charters defines theme as the generalization about the
meaning of a story (1013). The theme in The Yellow Wallpaper describes the
struggle of women to live in a male-dominated society. Gilman portrays the


man as insensitive and lacking in emotional support. From the beginning of
the story forward the narrator speaks of how her husband and other men in her
life direct her so that she will recover quickly. The narrator shows that
even though she is convinced that she knows what to do about her depression,
she is still influenced by her husband with the following passage: "I
sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more
society and stimulus but John says the very worst thing I can do is to
think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad" (306).
Her husband seems to be the one who can change her thoughts because he is a
man or because he is her husband. Nonetheless, she is still being suppressed
by a member of the opposite sex. Many times the narrator also speaks in a way
that suggests that because a man speaks she has no means by which to disagree
with him because she is a woman. A perfect example of this is presented in
the beginning passages of the story, where the narrator states, "Personally,
I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with
excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?" (306). This
last sentence "But what is one to do?" exemplifies wonderfully her oppressed
female stature in the society of her life. She states right from the
beginning that "John is a physician, and perhaps - (I would not say it to a
living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)
- perhaps that is the one reason I do not get well faster" (306). She
obviously loves her husband and trusts him but has some underlying feeling
that maybe his prescription of total bed rest is not working for her. In the
second passage the narrator becomes comfortable with the room, now she likes
the room enough and is curious enough to open up to her husband and tell him
what she thinks she has been seeing. John becomes terrified of these ideas
she has in her head and what she might believe to be real and not real. He


begins to plead with her and tries to convince her that she must control all
of her ambitions and act sanely. Later John is trying to manipulate the
narrator with guilt. He is implying that she must think of herself as getting
better, mind and body, for the sake of other people, rather than herself. The
narrator is, however, doubting that she will ever recover mentally. Although
John says her appearance has improved, she believes that she is not
physically better. The final passages of the story, at last, successfully
manifest a display of power and possible regain of self-governance through
the narrator's finally standing up to her husband by locking him out of the
room in which he has imprisoned her supposedly for her benefit. Whereupon,
for the first time in the story, he must listen to her entreaties to discover
where the key is hidden (317).
According to Charters, point of view is the authors choice of a
narrator for the story (1009). In this story the narrator is a first person
narrator. We can easily see what is going on the head of the main character.
We can feel sorry for her because she is a victim of male oppression.
However, we are presented with a biased story. We can only see the events
that take place from her point of view, which turns out to be quite
distorted. She stares at this wallpaper for hours on end and thinks she sees
a woman behind the paper. "I didn't realize for a long time what the thing
was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a
woman" (313). She becomes obsessed with discovering what is behind that
pattern and what it is doing. "I don't want to leave now until I have found
it out" (314). Once the narrator determines that the image is in fact a woman
struggling to become free, she somehow aligns herself with the woman. We
dont see that until she mentions that she often sees the woman creeping
outside: "I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her


in those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden.... I don't blame
her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight! I
always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I
know John would suspect something at once" (315). This shows the narrator
seeing herself in the woman and when she sees the woman creeping outside, she
sees herself. When she creeps outside she locks the door. She is afraid her
husband will take away the only comfort she has. She continues to pursue this
obsessive idea that she has to get the woman out. The narrator wants the
woman to be free of the paper but does not want to let her go, because the
woman is what keeps her focused and sane: "I don't want to go out, and I
don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him.
I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get
out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!" (317). She peels all the
wallpaper that she can reach. She wants to help the woman get out, and she
becomes quite extreme: "I am getting angry enough to do something desperate.
To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too
strong even to try. Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well
enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued" (317).
She goes on to say, "I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are
so many those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all
come out of that wallpaper as I did? (317). It seems she has released the
woman and it is indeed herself. As if she enjoys being out and doing as she
likes but at night her husband will be around and she mustn't creep around
her husband. He might find her mad. But at last she finds the courage to
confront her oppressor and stand up for herself. "'What is the matter?' he
cried. 'For God's sake, what are you doing!' I kept on creeping just the
same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. 'I've got out at last,' said I,


'in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you
can't put me back!' (318). Jane is undoubtedly the narrator herself. She is
the result of a distorted mind trying to free herself from the male
oppression. From the narrators point of view we had this fact hidden
throughout the story. However, as soon as her mind has freed itself, she had
freed herself both from her husband and from her own identity.
In order to read and understand this story, we must consider many
things. First the time frame in which the story was written, and that
society's attitude of the story content at that time. Written in 1892, a
woman suffering from depression was not clearly understood and was treated
with isolation. This would clearly drive any person mad. The narrator made
attempts to bring to her husband's attention what she felt was a better way
of making her better but he refused to listen and ignored her wishes to
involve herself in more activity. This was the experience of Gilman herself.
She shares that she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper to save people from being
crazy (879).
Works Cited
Charters, Ann. The Elements of Fiction. The Story and Its Writer: An
2003. 1003 1015.
Gilbert, Sandra m., and Gubar, Susan. A Feminist Reading of Gilmans The
Yellow Wallpaper. [First published 1979.] Rpt. The Story and Its Writer: An
Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 873 875.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. [First published 1892.]
Rpt. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann
Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 306 318.


Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. [First
published 1913.] Rpt. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short
Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,
2003. 878 879.
2002, Ruzha Todorova


Sheena Van Landuyt
27 November 2002

Hidden Labyrinth
To complete a puzzle properly each and every piece must be
accounted for; otherwise the final product is never comprehensive. A puzzle
with missing pieces is very much like a story with missing elements. Every
element plays an important role in the meaning and the integrity of the
story. Clearly, with a puzzle there are pieces that are more consequential
if missing than others. Just like a puzzle there are significant elements in
a story that make a big difference. If such elements are removed some of the
realistic aspects a story needs for readers to be able to relate are missing
as well. Although there are many elements that go into a story there are two
that are profoundly important to have in a story. These two elements are
recognized as the plot and characters.
A plot can be described as the sequence of events in a story and
there relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a conflict
(Charters, Elements 1003). It is usually desirable for the author to
present the plot in the beginning of the story, laid out so readers can
easily follow the events and their significance (Charters, Elements 1003).
The conflict within the story is profoundly important to how the plot is
going to be laid out since the plot itself is usually impacted by the
conflict throughout the story. This point can be seen in Maupassants The
Necklace extremely well.


In the beginning of the story The Necklace Maupassant lays out the
foundation of the conflict for his readers. Mme. Loisel is a pretty woman
who longs for something more than she has and she pays for this throughout
the story ( Maupassant 524). This internal conflict expands throughout the
entire story. Mme. Loisel wants to be richer but she is married to a clerk
and is far from rich (Maupassant 524). This first conflict illustrated by
Maupassant drives the story very well. The second conflict presented in The
Necklace was when the dinner invitation came. This conflict seems to be
more external, because it is not a conflict Mme. Loisel has been struggling
with internally for years. However, when the dinner invitation is presented
another conflict is introduced. Mme. Loisel wants to attend this elaborate
dinner, but not unless she can be in the most magnificent clothing and
jewelry (Maupassant 525). This point is well illustrated when Mme. Loisel
states, there is nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other
women who are rich (Maupassant 526). Continuously after these two conflicts
are introduced, she is introduced to more that get her into trouble. Thus
the conflict within the story is driving the plot and consistently
reappearing (Charters, Elements 1003).
Within the plot there are components that are critically
important when exploring a story. These components consist of exposition,
rising action, climax, falling action and conclusion (Charters, Elements
1004-1005). Exposition includes the introduction of characters, scene,
time, and situation (Charters, Elements 1004). In The Necklace the
exposition seemed to be in the beginning when the introduction of Mme. Loisel
is taking place. At this point the author gives only a brief background of
the past and present dimensions of her life (Maupassant 524). The rising
action of a story is generally the dramatization of events that complicate


the situation and gradually intensify the conflict (Charters, Elements
1005). In The Necklace this point would be when the couple is invited to
the dinner party the reader can not tell at this point that the invitation is
significant but it is (Maupassant 525). The climax can basically be
described as the turning point in the story (Charters, Elements 1005).
The climax is this particular story would surely be when Mme. Loisel
discovers her necklace as missing (Maupassant 527). The falling action moves
the conflict towards a solution (Charters, Elements 1005). In Mme.
Loisels case this would be when she sees her friend Mme. Forestier on the
street and confronts her. Once the conclusion sets in and ties together all
the loose strings, the reader get the surprise that the necklace was fake the
entire time (Maupassant 530). As one can see the plot plays a huge role in
the development of a short story.
Another important aspect of developing a short story is the
character developed in the context of the story. It is important that
characters be realistic in any story. Writers can accomplish the task of
reality by making the characters either dynamic or static (Charters,
Elements 1007). A static character is one that does not change throughout
the story, while a dynamic character changes. Mme. Loisel is both a static
and dynamic character. Mme. Loisel changes when the necklace disappears
making her dynamic. This is true in the beginning she is from lower middle
class where she has a comfortable home and servants (Maupassant 524).
However, when the necklace disappears and must be replaced, she is forced to
release her servants and change her lodging in order to pay off her debts.
This change in Mme. Loisel is permanent thus making her a dynamic character
(Maupassant 528).


It is also easy for one to see Mme. Loisel as a static character
also. This is due to the fact that Mme. Loisel never really changes in some
aspects. Throughout the entire story she is envious of other people. One
can see this at the beginning of the story with the introduction of the
invitation. At this point Mme. Loisel insists on an expensive dress and
necklace (Maupassant 525-526). It can also be seen at the end of the story
when Mme. Loisel sees her friend Jeanne again for the first time in awhile
and is still envious of her wealth and beauty. This aspect of Mme. Loisels
character also makes her static (Maupassant 529-530). One can see how the
plot and characters play an important role together in shaping the story and
laying it out for the reader to understand. The plot helps to set the
conflict, which in turn drives the plot as well as characters actions and
motives.
As an author, having the ability to integrate such important
elements of a story successfully can be very difficult. Guy De Maupassant
was not a naturally gifted writer, which makes the morals and outline of his
stories even more believable (Charters, Guy De 523). Maupassant had
difficulties in school while he was younger, which may explain why he joined
the army during the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War (Charters, Guy De 523).
Maupassant was later taught how to write by a relative of the name Gustave
Flaubert. Maupassant recalled writing, verses, short stories, longer
stories, even a wretched play. Nothing survived. The master read everything
(Charters, Guy De 523). It seemed that Maupassant was not a natural talent
when it came to writing, which makes his writing meaningful because he must
have struggled to write well and overcame the challenge. Flaubert instructed
Maupassant that talent is nothing other than a long patience. Work
(Charters, Guy De 523). This may be an important aspect of Maupassants


life to examine. Maupassant writings seem to be packed with morals and
hidden messages possibly due to lessons installed by Flaubert.
Another important lesson Flaubert tried to install in his pupil
was to look at everything within the context of any literary work and
discover the one component that every other reader has missed. Flaubert
explained the fact that every piece has some hidden labyrinth or message
unexplored (Charters, Guy De 523). The lessons installed in Maupassant by
Flaubert may be a large factor in the way he wrote. Since Flaubert focused
so much on details and hidden unexplored messages, it is easy to see why
there are so many subtle clues in The Necklace that readers can discover
and interpret as they wish.
Another important influence on Maupassants writing may simply be
the era he was living in while he composed his stories. Ann Charters
explains that Maupassants plots are tightly organized and usually conclude
with a decisive action (Charters, Brief History 998). Maupassant plays
close attention to physical and mental details. As a writer he favors a
surprise ending, as one can tell by the ending of The Necklace (Charters,
Brief History 998). Maupassants literary era could be classified primarily
as 19th Century Literary Realism (Agatucci 3). This period of literature
involved real people with everyday events in which ordinary people could
relate. Also this period places a large importance on classes and
relationships between upper and lower classes, which is what Maupassant does
extremely well (Agatucci 3).
Maupassant is an exceptional writer and as explained in her essay How I
Stumbled upon Maupassant, Kate Chopin explains how readers may not realize
just how wonderful he is until they truly understand him. Kate Chopin
explains her findings of Maupassants writing as somewhat of an inspiration.


Chopin believes that his writings do not speak to everyone as a group but to
each reader individually, by what the reader sees and hears within the pages
(Chopin 861). Chopin describes Maupassant as a man who escaped from
tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and look out upon life
through his own being (Chopin 861).
It is almost as if Chopin found herself as a writer when she
began to study Maupassants work. Also she sees him as secretly telling
hints of his stories within the pages. Maupassant does not just come out and
explain the important hidden messages within his stories; he expresses them
through the feelings each reader experiences while reading his literature
(Chopin 861).
It takes many special components to write a story. Maupassant
had the opportunity to show his readers the elegance of his writing.
Maupassant had a gift at combining elements of fiction like characters and
plot. Through the combination of his history, era and hard work he developed
stories literature readers could enjoy and relate to for generations.
Works Cited to come . . .
2002, Sheena Van Landuyt


Anonymous #1
27 November 2002

[Untitled: On Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog"]

Anton Chekov is said to [to be] extremely modest about his extraordinary
ability to empathize with the characters that he wrote about in his stories
(Charters, 134). He was careful not stereotype any of the characters he
portrayed nor did he over dramatize the storys plot. The characters emotions
and reactions to those emotions were the vehicle for the stories plot.
Chekovs only desired to write about real people with real feelings which
allowed his writings such as The Lady with the Little Dog, the seriousness
and sympathy it deserves. Chekov emphasized on the man and the woman always
being the two pole [of every story] (p. 949). Just as there are pulls
toward poles of the earth so are the pulls on the characters in his stories;
these pulls being forces of life and life circumstance. The Lady with the
Little Dog demonstrates how reality forces undesired role play between a man
and woman in love which is one of the definitive of literary realism
established by Professor Agatucci; [The Lady with the Little Dog] is an
example of A slice of life such as ordinary people of contemporary times
live in society caught up by social forces (p. 3). The storys main
characters, Anna and Dimitri, their desire to be together are conflicted with
the duties they have in common which are husband and wife to two different
people. However, the love that Dimitri and Anna share represents the struggle


of duties just as the desire for most people in society to want to break from
reality.
Dimitri, unlike Anna, was not upset or regretful of their love
affair because he had begun to be unfaithful to [his wife] long ago, was
unfaithful often, and, probably for that reason, almost always spoke ill of
women, and when they were discussed in his presence, he would say of them:
An inferior race!(p.144). Dimitri was introduced in the story as taking on
an egotistical and selfish role knowing very well that not only was he beyond
so many years to Anna but also, in his tone and caresses, there has been a
slight shade of mockery, the somewhat coarse arrogance of a happy man (p.
149). He seemed to have had his way with Anna and did not want to fall short
of this good thing. In contrast, Anna responded in way that she was new to
being unfaithful to her husband and maybe even realized that she was not
Dimitris first mistress. She admits, I love an honest man, pure life, sin
is vile to me, I myself dont know what Im doing(p. 147). Anna knew right
from the first day she met Dimitri that she loved him but those feelings over
powered her judgment and duty to her husband. She could only try to justify
that this was not real love that they shared but a scandalous and un-
righteous thing to be apart of.
Anna and Dimitri are considered to be dynamic characters because
not only to do they change the way they feel about each other but they also
change the way they feel about their life circumstances. Moreover, are also
considered to be well-rounded characters encompassing the substance of the
story Chekov intended. Dimitirs wife is only mentioned a few times and is
considered to be a flat character because we do not get a sense for how she
reacts to Dimitris scandalous love affairs. However, we do have Dimitris
point of view of her to be a woman who loved without sincerity, with


superfluous talk, affectedly, with hysteria, with an expression as if it were
not passion (p. 146). He obviously had a very superficial relationship with
his wife that only made him compare his happiness and love with Anna. Anna
followed Dimitri everywhere, he could hear her breathing and saw resemblances
of her in the oddest of places (p.150). His life back home was boring and
uninteresting to him. He only became so appreciative by Annas beauty and
the excitement that he gave him when she was away. Meanwhile, Chekov did not
explain to us the process by which she changed in her character however, Anna
admitted that she adored him and he was all that she could think about. She
realized her triteness before when she tried thought that she was just a
trashy woman(p.147).
Dimitris desire to find Anna after many years of being in Moscow
is considered to be an important turning point in the story. Dimitri
forfeits his strength that he could live without her because his emotions
were too high strung and he valued being with her too intensely. After
meeting up with Anna at the Geisha, he was able to test Anna and wait for her
to reveal her true feeling so that he was not just imaging she was in love
with him. And so the climax begins, Anna reveals, I think only of you all
the time, Ive lived with only thoughts of you. Furthermore, the falling
action of the story is the plan of continued rendezvous in Moscow secretly.
He and Anna loved each other like very close dear people, like husband and
wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had destined
them for each other, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she
a husband (p. 155). They were bound like soul mates and did want to live
the false lives they had with people they were not in love with. So they
knew that their problems were far from few and the most complicated and
difficult part was just beginning (p. 155). The conclusion of a happy


ending is left by the reader to implore because Chekov left it open with a
purpose. The purpose was to leave it less dramatic and predictable.
The love that these two people shared simplified the term love
is pain but more importantly they finally found each other and they did not
have to live in falsity. This true love was a new and treacherous territory
that they did not want to avoid. The willingness they had caused them to want
to break away from the roles that bound them for such a long time. Chekov
showed transformation and humbleness of the characters in The Lady with the
Little Dog and is a story that many could appeal to because of its deepest
emotional level between the characters of Anna and Dimitri.
Works Cited
Community College). Emergence of the Short Story: Literary Romanticism and
Realism. Poe and Maupassant; Myth Lit. Theory. In-class Presentation,
English 104: Introduction to Literature: Fiction, Central Oregon Community
College [Bend, OR.], Fall 2002. Online Handout Outline [accessed] 21Oct.
2002: http://www.cocc.edu /cagatucci/classes/eng104coursepack/shortstory.htm
Carver, Raymond. The Ashtray.[First published 1984] Rpt. The Story and Its
Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2003. 949.
Chekov, Anton. The Lady with the Little Dog. [First published 1899]. Rpt.
The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charter.
Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins 2003. 143-155.
Ford, Richard. Why We Like Chekov. [First published 1998] Rpt. The Story
and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Story Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters.
Compact 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. 869-873.
2002, Held by Student


XXII. Appendix II: A Glossary of Literary
Terms



A Glossary of Literary Terms

Adapted from: http://home.mesastate.edu/~blaga/fictionelements.htm,
http://www.greatneck.k12.ny.us/GNPS/EMB/Lizhome/literaryterms.htm,
http://www.southlakems.org/literaryanalysis_terms.htm,
http://www.virtualsalt.com/litterms.htm, and http://www.virtualsalt.com/litterms.htm by Robert Harris
Cliffs Advanced Placement English Language and Composition Preparation Guide,
By Barbara V. Swovelin, 1993

One way to make sense of a story / narrative is to focus on what are called the elements of fiction. These elements
are fundamental parts of all storytelling, and they include: plot and structure, character, setting, point of view, style and
language, and theme. While we may discuss these elements separately, please keep in mind that they are always acting
simultaneously in a story. It is difficult, for example, to discuss theme without considering character, plot, point of view,
and setting.
Act A main division of a drama. Shakespeare's plays consist of five acts with each act subdivided into scenes.
Adventure novel A novel where exciting events are more important than character development and sometimes theme.
Examples:
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Allegory A figurative work in which a surface narrative carries a secondary, symbolic or metaphorical meaning. In The
Faerie Queene, for example, Red Cross Knight is a heroic knight in the literal narrative, but also a figure representing
Everyman in the Christian journey. Many works contain allegories or are allegorical in part, but not many are entirely
allegorical. A good example of a fully allegorical work is
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
The device of using character and/or story elements symbolically to represent an abstraction in addition to the literal
meaning. In some allegories, for example, an author may intend the characters to personify an abstraction like hope or
freedom. The allegorical meaning usually deals with moral truth or a generalization about human existence.

Alliteration The repetition of sounds, especially initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words (as in she
sells sea shells). Although the term is not used in the multiple-choice section, you can look for alliteration in any essay
passage. The repetition can reinforce meaning, unify ideas, and/or supply a musical sound.

Allusion A reference to a literary or historical person or event to explain a present situation. Allusion from mythology:
"Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight / with a new Gorgon." Allusion is also important in that a writer may
convey a larger meaning by alluding to (that is, subtly referring to) another story, character (fictional or real), place,
event, or object. This is a subtle and economical way to suggest larger significance and meaning. For example, Allie Foxs
naming of his ice-machine as Fat Boy in the novel The Mosquito Coast. is a key allusion or reference to the first atomic
bomb. By this single allusion, Theroux is able to foreshadow events, link Allies invention with other destructive
inventions, make us question the value of some technological advances, and even ask us to question the value of
technology itself and those who employ that technology in the name of peace and civilization. If we recognize the


allusion, then meaning and significance are enriched and developed without having the author spell everything out for
us.

Keep in mind that imagery and allusions (as well as plot, structure, character, setting) can function ironically. That is,
there is a contrast or discrepancy between one thing and another, especially between what is said and what is meant or
between what happens and what is expected to happen. (i.e. images of life and fertility surrounding a character who is
dying. Again, your task is to figure out the significance of the irony. Why be ironic? Whats the point?

A direct or indirect reference to something which is presumably commonly known, such as an event, book, myth, place,
or work of art. Allusions can be historical, (like referring to Hitler), literary (like referring to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness),
religious (like referring to Noah and the flood), or mythical (like referring to Atlas).

Ambiguity The multiple meanings, either intentional or unintentional, of a word, phrase, sentence, or passage.

Analogy A similarity or comparison between two different things or the relationship between them. An analogy can
explain something unfamiliar by associating it with or pointing out its similarity to something more familiar. Analogies
can also make writing more vivid, imaginative, or intellectually engaging.

Antecedent The word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun. The language exam occasionally asks for the
antecedent of a given pronoun in a long, complex sentence or in a group of sentences.

Aphorism A terse statement of known authorship which expresses a general truth or a moral principle. (If the
authorship is unknown, the statement is generally considered to be a folk proverb.) An aphorism can be a memorable
summation of the authors point.

Apostrophe A figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such
as liberty or love. The effect may add familiarity or emotional intensity. William Wordsworth addresses John Milton as
he writes, Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.

Apologue A moral fable, usually featuring personified animals or inanimate objects which act like people to allow the
author to comment on the human condition. Often, the apologue highlights the irrationality of mankind. The beast
fable, and the fables of Aesop are examples. Some critics have called Samuel Johnson's Rasselas an apologue rather than a
novel because it is more concerned with moral philosophy than with character or plot. Examples:
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
Aside A brief remark made by a character and intended to be heard by the audience but not by other characters.

Atmosphere The tone or mood established by events, places or situations. Example: The foreboding atmosphere of the
words, "Fair is foul and foul is fair."

The emotional mood created by the entirety of a literary work, established partly by the setting and partly by the authors
choice of objects that are described. Even such elements as a description of the weather can contribute to the
atmosphere. Frequently, atmosphere foreshadows events. See mood.

Attitude An authors, speakers, characters, opinion of or feelings toward a subject. Attitudes may shift either slightly
or from one extreme to the other. Authors often create readers attitudes by manipulating characters attitudes.

A writers intellectual position or emotion regarding the subject of the writing. In the essay section, expect to be asked
what the writers attitude is and how his or her language conveys that attitude

Autobiographical novel A novel based on the author's life experience. Many novelists include in their books people
and events from their own lives because remembrance is easier than creation from scratch. Examples:


James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Blank Verse Unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Burlesque A work designed to ridicule a style, literary form, or subject matter either by treating the exalted in a trivial
way or by discussing the trivial in exalted terms (that is, with mock dignity). Burlesque concentrates on derisive imitation,
usually in exaggerated terms. Literary genres (like the tragic drama) can be burlesqued, as can styles of sculpture,
philosophical movements, schools of art, and so forth. See Parody, Travesty.
Canon In relation to literature, this term is half-seriously applied to those works generally accepted as the great ones. A
battle is now being fought to change or throw out the canon for three reasons. First, the list of great books is thoroughly
dominated by DWEM's (dead, white, European males), and the accusation is that women and minorities and non-Western
cultural writers have been ignored. Second, there is pressure in the literary community to throw out all standards as the
nihilism of the late 20th century makes itself felt in the literature departments of the universities. Scholars and professors
want to choose the books they like or which reflect their own ideas, without worrying about canonicity. Third, the canon
has always been determined at least in part by political considerations and personal philosophical biases. Books are much
more likely to be called "great" if they reflect the philosophical ideas of the critic.
Character We all know what character refers to, and we all know that we should be preoccupied with who these
characters are and how they act. As Robert DiYanni writes, we should approach fictional characters with the same
concerns with which we approach people. We need to be alert for how we are to take them, for what we are to make of
them, and we need to see how they may reflect our own experience. We need to observe their actions, to listen to what
they say and how they say it, to notice how they relate to other characters and how other characters respond to them,
especially to what they say about each other. To make inferences about characters, we look for connections, for links
and clues to their function and significance in the story. In analyzing a character or characters relationships, we relate
one act, one speech, one physical detail to another until we understand the character.
Characterization is the way a writer creates and develops a character's personality. The reader learns about the
character by observing his or her appearance, actions, words and what other characters say about him or her.
Types of characters include:
o round characters - fully developed, two dimensional, the reader knows quite a bit about them
o flat characters - not fully developed, one dimensional, the reader does not know much about them
o static characters - remain the same throughout the story
o dynamic characters - change as the story develops
o main character - has the most serious problem in the story
o contrasting characters - are almost opposite one another, making the characteristics of each very
obvious
In sum, to understand character, you need to look closely at ....
narrative summary about characters
the metaphorical value of surface details of dress and physical appearance (and when it changes)
what characters say and how they say it
what characters say about themselveswhat they think and feel
how characters respond to what happens to them
how the characters interact with other characters (i.e. who or what opposes them?)
the change, if any, that takes place in a character. Account for the change.
Major Characters Almost always round or three-dimensional characters. They have good and bad qualities.
Their goals, ambitions and values change. A round character changes as a result of what happens to him or her.
A character who changes inside as a result of what happens to him is referred to in literature as a DYNAMIC
character. A dynamic character grows or progresses to a higher level of understanding in the course of the
story.
Protagonist
The main character in the
story
Antagonist
The character or force that opposes
the protagonist.
Foil
A character who provides a contrast to
the protagonist.


Minor Characters Almost always flat or two-dimensional characters. They have only one or two striking
qualities. Their predominant quality is not balanced by an opposite quality. They are usually all good or all bad.
Such characters can be interesting or amusing in their own right, but they lack depth. Flat characters are
sometimes referred to as STATIC characters because they do not change in the course of the story.
Children's novel A novel written for children and discerned by one or more of these: (1) a child character or a
character a child can identify with, (2) a theme or themes (often didactic) aimed at children, (3) vocabulary and sentence
structure available to a young reader. Many "adult" novels, such as Gulliver's Travels, are read by children. The test is that
the book be interesting to and--at some level--accessible by children. Examples:
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Chorus In ancient Greek drama, the singing and dancing group whose words formed commentary or interpretation of
action. In Elizabethan drama the role of the chorus was often taken by one actor, who recited a prologue, or by several
actors, who offered commentary on a situation.

Clause A grammatical unit that contains both a subject and a verb. An independent, or main, clause expresses a
complete thought and can stand alone as a sentence. A dependent, or subordinate, clause cannot stand alone as a
sentence and must be accompanied by an independent clause. Examine this sample sentence: Because I practiced hard,
my scores were high. In this sentence, the independent clause is my scores were high, and the dependent clause is
Because I practiced hard.

Colloquial/colloquialism The use of slang or informalities in speech or writing. Not generally acceptable for formal
writing, colloquialisms give a work a conversational, familiar tone. Colloquial expressions in writing include local or
regional dialects.

Comic relief A humorous scene or speech in a serious drama which is meant to provide relief from emotional intensity
and, by contrast, to heighten the seriousness of the story.

Coming-of-age story A type of novel where the protagonist is initiated into adulthood through knowledge, experience,
or both, often by a process of disillusionment. Understanding comes after the dropping of preconceptions, a destruction
of a false sense of security, or in some way the loss of innocence. Some of the shifts that take place are these:
ignorance to knowledge
innocence to experience
false view of world to correct view
idealism to realism
immature responses to mature responses
Example:
Jane Austen Northanger Abbey
Conceit A fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy between seemingly
dissimilar objects. A conceit displays intellectual cleverness due to the unusual comparison being made.

An elaborate, usually intellectually ingenious poetic comparison or image, such as an analogy or metaphor in which, say
a beloved is compared to a ship, planet, etc. The comparison may be brief or extended. See Petrarchan Conceit.


(Conceit is an old word for concept.) See John Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," for example: "Let man's
soul be a sphere, and then, in this, / The Intelligence that moves, devotion is."

Concrete detail Strictly defined, concrete refers to nouns that name physical objectsa bridge, a book, a coat.
Concrete nouns are the opposite of abstract nouns (which refer to concepts like freedom and love). However, as used in
the essay portion of the test, this term has a slightly different connotation. The directions may read something like this:
Provide concrete detail that will convince the reader. This means that your essay should include details and evidence
that relate to the topic. At times, youll find the detail in the passage; at times, youll be asked to provide detail from your
own life (reading, observation, experience, etc.).
Conflict Conflict is the essence of fiction. It creates plot. The conflicts we encounter can usually be identified as one of
four kinds.
Man versus Man
Conflict that pits one person against another.
Man versus Nature
A run-in with the forces of nature. On the one hand, it expresses the insignificance of a single human life in the cosmic
scheme of things. On the other hand, it tests the limits of a persons strength and will to live.
Man versus Society
The values and customs by which everyone else lives are being challenged. The character may come to an untimely end
as a result of his or her own convictions. The character may, on the other hand, bring others around to a sympathetic
point of view, or it may be decided that society was right after all.
Man versus Self
Internal conflict. Not all conflict involves other people. Sometimes people are their own worst enemies. An internal
conflict is a good test of a characters values. Does he give in to temptation or rise above it? Does he demand the most
from himself or settle for something less? Does he even bother to struggle? The internal conflicts of a character and how
they are resolved are good clues to the characters inner strength.
Conflict is the struggle that the main character faces with an external (outside) or internal (inside) force. There
are four kinds of conflicts:
o Main character struggles with another character
o Main character struggles with himself / herself
o Main character struggles with others (society)
o Main character struggles with a force of nature
Often, more than one kind of conflict is taking place at the same time. In every case, however, the existence of conflict
enhances the readers understanding of a character and creates the suspense and interest that make you want to continue
reading.

Connotation The non-literal, associative meaning of a word; the implied, suggested meaning. Connotations may
involve ideas, emotions, or attitudes. See denotation.

Denotation The strict, literal, dictionary definition of a word, devoid or any emotion, attitude, or color. See connotation.

Descriptive detail When an essay question uses this phrase, look for the writers sensory description. Descriptive detail
appealing to the visual sense is usually the most predominant, but dont overlook other sensory detail. As usual, after
you identify a passages descriptive detail, analyze its effect.


Detail Items or parts that form a larger picture or story. Authors choose or select details to create effects in their works
or evoke responses from the reader.
Detective novel A novel focusing on the solving of a crime, often by a brilliant detective, and usually employing the
elements of mystery and suspense. Examples:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison
Devices The figures of speech, syntax, diction, and other stylistic elements that collectively produce a particular artistic
effect.

Diction Related to style, diction refers to the writers word choices, especially with regard to their correctness, clearness,
or effectiveness. An author chooses words to create effects that enhance the meaning of his work. Words that can be
discussed as examples of an authors diction as it enhances the meaning of the work can often be used also as example
of detail that enhances meaning. One can distinguish between diction and detail by rewording; if changing the words in
a passage to their synonyms changes the effect, the effect is achieved by the diction; if changing the words does not
change the effect, the effect has been achieved by the authors choice of detail. For the exam, you should be able to
describe an authors diction (for example, formal or informal, ornate or plain) and understand ways in which diction can
complement the authors purpose. Diction, combined with syntax, figurative language, literary devices, etc., creates an
authors style. See syntax.

Didactic From the Greek, didactic literally means teaching. Didactic works have the primary aim of teaching or
instructing, especially the teaching of moral or ethical principles.

Dystopian novel An anti-utopian novel where, instead of a paradise, everything has gone wrong in the attempt to create
a perfect society. See utopian novel. Examples:
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Ellipsis The omission of a word or several words necessary for a complete construction that is still understandable. If
rainy, bring and umbrella is clear though the words it is and you have been left out.

End-stopped A line that has a natural pause at the end (period, comma, etc.). For example, these lines are end stopped:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
Coral is far more red than her lips red. --Shakespeare
Enjambed. The running over of a sentence or thought into the next couplet or line without a pause at the end
of the line; a run-on line. For example, the first two lines here are enjambed:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove. . . . --Shakespeare

Epic An extended narrative poem recounting actions, travels, adventures, and heroic episodes and written in a high style
(with ennobled diction, for example). It may be written in hexameter verse, especially dactylic hexameter, and it may
have twelve books or twenty four books. Characteristics of the classical epic include these:
The main character or protagonist is heroically larger than life, often the source and subject of legend or a
national hero


The deeds of the hero are presented without favoritism, revealing his failings as well as his virtues
The action, often in battle, reveals the more-than-human strength of the heroes as they engage in acts of
heroism and courage
The setting covers several nations, the whole world, or even the universe
The episodes, even though they may be fictional, provide an explanation for some of the circumstances or
events in the history of a nation or people
The gods and lesser divinities play an active role in the outcome of actions
All of the various adventures form an organic whole, where each event relates in some way to the central
theme
Typical in epics is a set of conventions (or epic machinery). Among them are these:
Poem begins with a statement of the theme ("Arms and the man I sing")
Invocation to the muse or other deity ("Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles")
Story begins in medias res (in the middle of things)
Catalogs (of participants on each side, ships, sacrifices)
Histories and descriptions of significant items (who made a sword or shield, how it was decorated, who
owned it from generation to generation)
Epic simile (a long simile where the image becomes an object of art in its own right as well as serving to
clarify the subject).
Frequent use of epithets ("Aeneas the true"; "rosy-fingered Dawn"; "tall-masted ship")
Use of patronymics (calling son by father's name): "Anchises' son"
Long, formal speeches by important characters
Journey to the underworld
Use of the number three (attempts are made three times, etc.)
Previous episodes in the story are later recounted
Examples:
Homer, Iliad
Homer, Odyssey
Virgil, Aeneid
Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered
Milton, Paradise Lost
Epistolary novel A novel consisting of letters written by a character or several characters. The form allows for the use
of multiple points of view toward the story and the ability to dispense with an omniscient narrator. Examples:
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
Fanny Burney, Evelina
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Hannah W. Foster, The Coquette
Epigram A pithy saying, often using contrast. The epigram is also a verse form, usually brief and pointed.

Euphemism From the Greek for good speech, euphemisms are a more agreeable or less offensive substitute for a
generally unpleasant word or concept. The euphemism may be used to adhere to standards of social or political


correctness or to add humor or ironic understatement. Saying earthly remains rather than corpse is an example of
euphemism.

The substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrase for a harsh or blunt one, as in the use of "pass away" instead
of "die." The basic psychology of euphemistic language is the desire to put something bad or embarrassing in a positive
(or at least neutral light). Thus many terms referring to death, sex, crime, and excremental functions are euphemisms.
Since the euphemism is often chosen to disguise something horrifying, it can be exploited by the satirist through the use
of irony and exaggeration.

Existentialist novel A novel written from an existentialist viewpoint, often pointing out the absurdity and
meaninglessness of existence. Example:
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Extended metaphor A metaphor developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a work. See
metaphor.

Fantasy novel Any novel that is disengaged from reality. Often such novels are set in nonexistent worlds, such as under
the earth, in a fairyland, on the moon, etc. The characters are often something other than human or include nonhuman
characters. Example:
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Flashback A device that allows the writer to present events that happened before the time of the current narration or
the current events in the fiction. Flashback techniques include memories, dreams, stories of the past told by characters,
or even authorial sovereignty. (That is, the author might simply say, "But back in Tom's youth. . . .") Flashback is useful
for exposition, to fill in the reader about a character or place, or about the background to a conflict.
Foot The basic unit of meter consisting of a group of two or three syllables. Scanning or scansion is the process of
determining the prevailing foot in a line of poetry, of determining the types and sequence of different feet.
Types of feet: U (unstressed); / (stressed syllable)
Iamb: U /
Trochee: / U
Anapest: U U /
Dactyl: / U U
Spondee: / /
Pyrrhic: U U
See also versification, below.
Foreshadowing-A hint of what is to come in the story. This is often used to keep the audience in a state of expectancy.
Frame A narrative structure that provides a setting and exposition for the main narrative in a novel. Often, a narrator
will describe where he found the manuscript of the novel or where he heard someone tell the story he is about to relate.
The frame helps control the reader's perception of the work, and has been used in the past to help give credibility to the
main section of the novel. Examples of novels with frames:
Mary Shelley Frankenstein


Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
Free verse Verse that has neither regular rhyme nor regular meter. Free verse often uses cadences rather than uniform
metrical feet.

Figurative language Writing or speech that is not intended to carry literal meaning and is usually meant to be
imaginative and vivid. See figure of speech.

Figure of speech A device used to produce figurative language. Many compare dissimilar things. Figures of speech
include, for example, apostrophe, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, metonomy, oxymoron, paradox, personification, simile,
synecdoche, and understatement.

Generic Conventions This term describes traditions for each genre. These conventions help to define each genre; for
example, they differentiate between an essay and journalistic writing or an autobiography and political writing. On the
language exam, try to distinguish the unique features of a writers work from those dictated by convention.

Genre The major category into which a literary work fits. The basic divisions of literature are prose, poetry, and drama.
However, genre is a flexible term; within these broad boundaries exist many subdivisions that are often called genres
themselves. For example, prose can be divided into fiction (novels and short stories) or nonfiction (essays, biographies,
autobiographies, etc.). Poetry can be divided into lyric, dramatic, narrative, epic, etc. Drama can be divided into tragedy,
comedy, melodrama, farce, etc. On the language exam, expect the majority of the passages to be from the following
genres: autobiography, biography, diaries, criticism, essays, and journalistic, political, scientific, and nature writing.
Gothic novel A novel in which supernatural horrors and an atmosphere of unknown terror pervades the action. The
setting is often a dark, mysterious castle, where ghosts and sinister humans roam menacingly. Horace Walpole invented
the genre with his Castle of Otranto. Gothic elements include these:
Ancient prophecy, especially mysterious, obscure, or hard to understand.
Mystery and suspense
High emotion, sentimentalism, but also pronounced anger, surprise, and especially terror
Supernatural events (e.g. a giant, a sighing portrait, ghosts or their apparent presence, a skeleton)
Omens, portents, dream visions
Fainting, frightened, screaming women
Women threatened by powerful, impetuous male
Setting in a castle, especially with secret passages
The metonymy of gloom and horror (wind, rain, doors grating on rusty hinges, howls in the distance, distant
sighs, footsteps approaching, lights in abandoned rooms, gusts of wind blowing out lights or blowing suddenly,
characters trapped in rooms or imprisoned)
The vocabulary of the gothic (use of words indicating fear, mystery, etc.: apparition, devil, ghost, haunted,
terror, fright)
Examples:
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
William Beckford, Vathek
Anne Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Grotesque Characterized by distortions or incongruities. The fiction of Poe or Flannery OConnor is often described as
grotesque.


Heroic Couplet Two lines of rhyming iambic pentameter. Most of Alexander Pope's verse is written in heroic couplets.
In fact, it is the most favored verse form of the eighteenth century. Example:

u / u / u / u / u /

'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill

u / u / u / u / u /

Appear in writing or in judging ill. . . .

--Alexander Pope

[Note in the second line that "or" should be a stressed syllable if the meter were perfectly iambic. Iambic= a two syllable
foot of one unstressed and one stressed syllable, as in the word "begin." Pentameter= five feet. Thus, iambic pentameter
has ten syllables, five feet of two syllable iambs.]
Historical novel A novel where fictional characters take part in actual historical events and interact with real people
from the past. Examples:
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott, Waverly
James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans
Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe
Humanism The new emphasis in the Renaissance on human culture, education and reason, sparked by a revival of
interest in classical Greek and Roman literature, culture, and language. Human nature and the dignity of man were
exalted and emphasis was placed on the present life as a worthy event in itself (as opposed to the medieval emphasis on
the present life merely as preparation for a future life).
Humours In medieval physiology, four liquids in the human body affecting behavior. Each humour was associated with
one of the four elements of nature. In a balanced personality, no humour predominated. When a humour did
predominate, it caused a particular personality. Here is a chart of the humours, the corresponding elements and
personality characteristics:
blood...air...hot and moist: sanguine, kind, happy, romantic
phlegm...water...cold and moist: phlegmatic, sedentary, sickly, fearful
yellow bile...fire...hot and dry: choleric, ill-tempered, impatient, stubborn
black bile...earth...cold and dry: melancholy, gluttonous, lazy, contemplative
The Renaissance took the doctrine of humours quite seriously--it was their model of psychology--so knowing that can
help us understand the characters in the literature. Falstaff, for example, has a dominance of blood, while Hamlet seems
to have an excess of black bile.
Hypertext novel A novel that can be read in a nonsequential way. That is, whereas most novels flow from beginning to
end in a continuous, linear fashion, a hypertext novel can branch--the reader can move from one place in the text to
another nonsequential place whenever he wishes to trace an idea or follow a character. Also called hyperfiction. Most are
published on CD-ROM. See also interactive novel. Examples:
Michael Joyce, Afternoon


Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden
Homily This term literally means sermon, but more informally, it can include any serious talk, speech, or lecture
involving moral or spiritual advice.

Hyperbole A figure of speech using deliberate exaggeration or overstatement. Hyperbole often has a comic effect;
however, a serious effect is also possible. Often, hyperbole produces irony at the same time.

Imagery The sensory details or figurative language used to describe, arouse emotion, or represent abstractions. On a
physical level, imagery uses terms related to the five senses; we refer to visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, of olfactory
imagery. On a broader and deeper level, however, one image can represent more than one thing. For example, a rose
may present visual imagery while also representing the color in a womans cheeks. An author, therefore, may use
complex imagery while simultaneously employing other figures of speech, especially metaphor and simile. In addition,
this term can apply to the total of all images in a work. On the exam, pay attention to how an author creates imagery and
to the effect of that imagery.

The term used to describe words or phrases that appeal to the five senses. Figurative language may create images, but
not all images are figures of speech. Language and style also includes images, the concrete representation of a sense
impression, feeling, or idea. Images may invoke our sight, hearing, sense of smell and taste, and tactile perceptions.
Imagery refers to a pattern of related details. When images form patterns of related details that convey an idea or feeling
beyond what the images literally describe, we call them metaphorical or symbolic. The details suggest one thing in terms
of another. For example, images of light often convey knowledge and life, while images of darkness sometimes suggest
ignorance or death.

Inference/infer To draw a reasonable conclusion from the information presented. When a multiple-choice question
asks for an inference to be drawn from a passage, the most direct, most reasonable inference is the safest answer choice.
If an inference is implausible, its unlikely to be the correct answer. Note that if the answer choice is directly stated, it is
not inferred and is wrong.

Interactive novel A novel with more than one possible series of events or outcomes. The reader is given the
opportunity at various places to choose what will happen next. It is therefore possible for several readers to experience
different novels by reading the same book or for one reader to experience different novels by reading the same one
twice and making different choices.
Invective An emotionally violent, verbal denunciation or attack using strong, abusive language. Speech or writing that
abuses, denounces, or attacks. It can be directed against a person, cause, idea, or system. It employs a heavy use of
negative emotive language. Example:
I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin
that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. --Swift

Irony/ironic he contrast between what is stated explicitly and what is really meant. The difference between what
appears to be and what actually is true. In general, there are three major types of irony used in language: (1) In verbal
irony, the words literally state the opposite of the writers (or speakers) true meaning. (2) In situational irony, events
turn out the opposite of what was expected. What the characters and readers think ought to happen is not what does
happen. (3) In dramatic irony, facts or events are unknown to a character in a play or piece of fiction but known to the
reader, audience, or other characters in the work. Irony is used for many reasons, but frequently its used to create
poignancy or humor.

A mode of expression, through words (verbal irony) or events (irony of situation), conveying a reality different from and
usually opposite to appearance or expectation. A contrast between what is and what appears to be. A writer may say the
opposite of what he means, create a reversal between expectation and its fulfillment, or give the audience knowledge that


a character lacks, making the character's words have meaning to the audience not perceived by the character. In verbal
irony, the writer's meaning or even his attitude may be different from what he says: "Why, no one would dare argue that
there could be anything more important in choosing a college than its proximity to the beach." An example of situational
irony would occur if a professional pickpocket had his own pocket picked just as he was in the act of picking someone
else's pocket. The irony is generated by the surprise recognition by the audience of a reality in contrast with expectation
or appearance, while another audience, victim, or character puts confidence in the appearance as reality (in this case, the
pickpocket doesn't expect his own pocket to be picked). The surprise recognition by the audience often produces a
comic effect, making irony often funny.
An example of dramatic irony (where the audience has knowledge that gives additional meaning to a character's words)
would be when King Oedipus, who has unknowingly killed his father, says that he will banish his father's killer when he
finds him.
Irony is the most common and most efficient technique of the satirist, because it is an instrument of truth, provides wit
and humor, and is usually at least obliquely critical, in that it deflates, scorns, or attacks.
The ability to detect irony is sometimes heralded as a test of intelligence and sophistication. When a text intended to be
ironic is not seen as such, the effect can be disastrous. Some students have taken Swift's "Modest Proposal" literally. And
Defoe's contemporaries took his "Shortest Way with the Dissenters" literally and jailed him for it. To be an effective
piece of sustained irony, there must be some sort of audience tip-off, through style, tone, use of clear exaggeration, or
other device.
Jargon The special language of a profession or group. The term jargon usually has pejorative associations, with the
implication that jargon is evasive, tedious, and unintelligible to outsiders. The writings of the lawyer and the literary
critic are both susceptible to jargon.
Loose sentence type of sentence in which the main idea (independent clause) comes first, followed by dependent
grammatical units such as phrases and clause. If a period were placed at the end of the independent clause, the clause
would be a complete sentence. A work containing many loose sentences often seems informal, relaxed, and
conversational. See periodic sentence.

Language And Style. The way a writer chooses words, arranges them in sentences and longer units of discourse, and
exploits their significance determines his or her style. Style is a kind of verbal identity of a writer that reflects the way a
writer sees the world. For example, Faulkners convoluted, complicated, long, and often formal prose conveys
something about the way Faulkner sees the South that he writes about. Hemingway, on the other hand, with his
minimal, fragmented, often interrupted and staccato style reveals something about his typical preoccupation as well,
World War I and its devastating effect on relationships. Again, form is content. How something is said is just as
important as what is said.

The big question here is... how does an authors style reveal or convey the way an author sees his or her
world?
How does an authors style reinforce or contradict the story itself?
Lampoon A crude, coarse, often bitter satire ridiculing the personal appearance or character of a person.
Language When youre asked to analyze the language, concentrate on how the elements of language combine to
form a wholehow diction, syntax, figurative language, and sentence structure create a cumulative effect.
Literary quality A judgment about the value of a novel as literature. At the heart of this issue is the question of what
distinguishes a great or important novel from one that is less important. Certainly the feature is not that of interest or
excitement, for pulp novels can be even more exciting and interesting than "great" novels. Usually, books that make us
think--that offer insight into the human condition--are the ones we rank more highly than books that simply titillate us.


Metonomy term for the Greek meaning changed label or substitute name, metonomy is a figure of speech in
which the name of one object is substituted for that of another closely associated with it. A news release that claims
the White House declared rather than the President declared is using metonomy. This term is unlikely to be used in
the multiple-choice section, but you might see examples of metonomy in an essay passage.
Mood This term has two distinct technical meanings in English writing. The first meaning is grammatical and deals with
verbal units and a speakers attitude. The indicative mood is used only for factual sentences. For example, Joe eats too
quickly. The subjunctive mood is used for a doubtful or conditional attitude. For example, If I were you, Id get
another job. The imperative mood is used for commands. For example, Shut the door! The second meaning of
mood is literary, meaning the prevailing atmosphere or emotional aura of a work. Setting, tone, and events can affect
the mood. In this usage, mood is similar to tone and atmosphere.

Metaphor A figure of speech that implies or states a comparison between two unlike
things which are similar in some way. Unlike similes, metaphors do not use like or as. Example: "Life's but a walking
shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more."
Figure of speech using implied comparison of seemingly unlike things or the substitution of one for the other,
suggesting some similarity. Metaphorical language makes writing more vivid, imaginative, thought provoking, and
meaningful. See simile.
Metaphysical Poetry The term metaphysical was applied to a style of 17th Century poetry first by John Dryden and later
by Dr. Samuel Johnson because of the highly intellectual and often abstruse imagery involved.
Chief among the metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Henry
Vaughan. While their poetry is widely varied (the metaphysicals are not a thematic or even a structural school), there are
some common characteristics:
1. Argumentative structure. The poem often engages in a debate or persuasive presentation; the poem is an
intellectual exercise as well as or instead of an emotional effusion.
2. Dramatic and colloquial mode of utterance. The poem often describes a dramatic event rather than being a reverie,
a thought, or contemplation. Diction is simple and usually direct; inversion is limited. The verse is occasionally
rough, like speech, rather than written in perfect meter, resulting in a dominance of thought over form.
3. Acute realism. The poem often reveals a psychological analysis; images advance the argument rather than
being ornamental. There is a learned style of thinking and writing; the poetry is often highly intellectual.
4. Metaphysical wit. The poem contains unexpected, even striking or shocking analogies, offering elaborate
parallels between apparently dissimilar things. The analogies are drawn from widely varied fields of knowledge,
not limited to traditional sources in nature or art. Analogies from science, mechanics, housekeeping, business,
philosophy, astronomy, etc. are common. These "conceits" reveal a play of intellect, often resulting in puns,
paradoxes, and humorous comparisons. Unlike other poetry where the metaphors usually remain in the
background, here the metaphors sometimes take over the poem and control it.
Metaphysical poetry represents a revolt against the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry and especially the typical
Petrarchan conceits (like rosy cheeks, eyes like stars, etc.).
Meter The rhythmic pattern produced when words are arranged so that their stressed and unstressed syllables fall into a
more or less regular sequence, resulting in repeated patterns of accent (called feet). See feet and versification.
Mock Epic Treating a frivolous or minor subject seriously, especially by using the machinery and devices of the epic
(invocations, descriptions of armor, battles, extended similes, etc.). The opposite of travesty. Examples:
Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
Alexander Pope, Rape of the Lock


Multicultural novel A novel written by a member of or about a cultural minority group, giving insight into non-
Western or non-dominant cultural experiences and values, either in the United States or abroad. Examples:
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife
Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree
Margaret Craven, I Heard the Owl Call My Name
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Mystery novel A novel whose driving characteristic is the element of suspense or mystery. Strange, unexplained events,
vague threats or terrors, unknown forces or antagonists, all may appear in a mystery novel. Gothic novels and detective
novels are often also mystery novels.
Narrative techniques Methods used in telling a story. These methods include (but are not limited to) point of view,(of
the writer), viewpoint (of a character), sequencing of events, manipulation of time, dialogue, or interior monologue.

This term describes the tools of the storyteller (also used in nonfiction), such as ordering events so that they build to a
climactic moment or withholding information until a crucial or appropriate moment when revealing it creates a desired
effect. On the essay exam, this term may also apply to biographical and autobiographical writing.
Novel Novels are so varied that any definition is likely to be inadequate to cover all of them. So here is a place to start:
a novel is an extended prose fiction narrative of 50,000 words or more, broadly realistic--concerning the everyday events
of ordinary people--and concerned with character. "People in significant action" is one way of describing it.
Another definition might be "an extended, fictional prose narrative about realistic characters and events." It is a
representation of life, experience, and learning. Action, discovery, and description are important elements, but the most
important tends to be one or more characters--how they grow, learn, find--or don't grow, learn, or find.
Compare the definition of a romance, below, and you will see why this definition seems somewhat restrictive.
Novella A prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. There is no standard definition of length, but
since rules of thumb are sometimes handy, we might say that the short story ends at about 20,000 words, while the novel
begins at about 50,000. Thus, the novella is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words. Examples:
Henry James, Daisy Miller
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Henry James, Turn of the Screw
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Novel of manners A novel focusing on and describing in detail the social customs and habits of a particular social
group. Usually these conventions function as shaping or even stifling controls over the behavior of the characters.
Examples:
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair


Onomatopoeia A figure of speech in which natural sounds are imitated in the sounds of words such as buzz, hiss, hum,
crack, whinny, and murmur. This term is not used in the multiple-choice section. If you identify examples of
onomatopoeia in an essay passage, note the effect.
Omniscient point of view The narrator of the story knows, and tells, what is in the minds of all the characters, can
speak directly to the reader and comment on the characters, their actions and motives, and can shift from time to time or
place to place.
Oxymoron From the Greek for pointedly foolish, an oxymoron is a figure of speech wherein the author groups
apparently contradictory terms to suggest a paradox. Simple examples include jumbo shrimp and cruel kindness.
This term does not appear in the multiple-choice questions, but there is a slight chance you will see it used by an author
in an essay passage or find it useful in your own essay writing.
Paradox A statement that appears to be self-contradictory or opposed to common sense but upon closer inspection
contains some degree of truth or validity. The first scene of Macbeth, for example, closes with the witches cryptic
remark Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Parallelism Also referred to as parallel construction or parallel structure, this term comes from the Greek roots
meaning beside one another. It refers to the grammatical or rhetorical framing of words, phrases, sentences, or
paragraphs to give structural similarity. This can involve, but is not limited to, repetition of a grammatical element such
as a preposition or verbal phrase. A famous example of parallelism begins Charles Dickenss novel A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the
epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity The effects of parallelism are numerous, but frequently, they act as
an organizing force to attract the readers attention, add emphasis and organization, or simply provide a musical rhythm.
Parody A work that closely imitates the style or content of another with the specific aim of comic effect and/or ridicule.
As comedy, parody distorts or exaggerates distinctive features of the original. As ridicule, it mimics the work by
repeating and borrowing words, phrases, or characteristics in order to illuminate weaknesses in the original. Well-written
parody offers enlightenment about the original, but poorly written parody offers only ineffectual imitation. Usually an
audience must grasp literary allusion and understand the work being parodied in order to fully appreciate the nuances of
the newer work. Occasionally, however, parodies take on a life of their own and dont require knowledge of the original.
Pedantic An adjective that describes words, phrases, or general tone that is overly scholarly, academic, or bookish.
Periodic sentence A sentence that presents its central meaning in a main clause at the end. This independent clause is
preceded by a phrase or clause that cannot stand alone. For example: Ecstatic with my scores, I let out a loud shout of
joy! The effect of a periodic sentence is to add emphasis and structural variety. See loose sentence.
Personification A figure of speech in which the author presents or describes concepts, animals, or inanimate objects by
endowing them with human attributes or emotions. Personification is used to make these abstractions, animals, or
objects appear more vivid to the reader.

Persuasive device When asked to analyze an authors persuasive devices, look for the words in the passage that have
strong connotations, words that intensify the emotional effect. In addition, analyze how these words complement the
writers argument as it builds logically. Speeches are often used in this context, since they are generally designed to
persuade.

Persuasive essay When asked to write a persuasive essay, you should present a coherent argument in which the
evidence builds to a logical and relevant conclusion. Strong persuasive essays often appeal to the audiences emotions or
ethical standards.
Persona The person created by the author to tell a story. Whether the story is told by an omniscient narrator or by a
character in it, the actual author of the work often distances himself from what is said or told by adopting a persona--a
personality different from his real one. Thus, the attitudes, beliefs, and degree of understanding expressed by the


narrator may not be the same as those of the actual author. Some authors, for example, use narrators who are not very
bright in order to create irony.
Petrarchan Conceit The kind of conceit (see above) used by Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch and popular in
Renaissance English sonnets. Eyes like stars or the sun, hair like golden wires, lips like cherries, etc. are common
examples. Oxymorons are also common, such as freezing fire, burning ice, etc.
Picaresque novel An episodic, often autobiographical novel about a rogue or picaro (a person of low social status)
wandering around and living off his wits. The wandering hero provides the author with the opportunity to connect
widely different pieces of plot, since the hero can wander into any situation. Picaresque novels tend to be satiric and
filled with petty detail. Examples:
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild
Plot and structure Plot and structure have to do with the arrangement, sequence, and organization of events that make
up a story. Many narratives are based on a conflict or struggle between opposing forces. The narrative begins with an
explanation of the situation and characters (the exposition) followed by a series of complicating factors (complicating
or rising action). There is a turning point, crisis, or climax, following by falling action or result. The story ends with a
resolution where the plots complications are sorted out and resolved. However, not all stories follow this pattern.
Many stories are not chronological. We start in the future, only to look in the past. There is often simultaneous action,
no climax, or no resolution.
Plot is the series of events in a story.
In any case, you should ...
Always look for patterns, design, and causality. Is there a downward trajectory or decline (i.e. life is fine until
some event destroys it?) or is there an upward trajectory (i.e. do characters work their way out of their
problems?). What actions lead to what results?
Is there a climax or turning point in the story? What led to this point? Who are the major players? Describe
the conflict(s).
What is the effect, purpose, or function of a non-chronological structure?
Does the structure indicate different points of view? a skewed point of view?
Does the structure have metaphorical value? That is, does the sequence of events indicate something beyond
itself? (i.e. the story of Noahs Ark is less a story about one family than a comment on the history of the world:
the unrepentant (those who dont get on the ark) will be destroyed).
Are there indications of events to come? That is, does the author foreshadow the future?
The fundamental question here is not just, What happened but What is significant about the way events
happened? Form is content.
Elements Of Plot All fiction is based on conflict and this conflict is presented in a structured format called PLOT.
Exposition
The introductory material which gives the setting, creates the tone, presents the characters, and presents other
facts necessary to understanding the story.
Foreshadowing


The use of hints or clues to suggest what will happen later in the story.
Inciting Force
The event or character that triggers the conflict.
Conflict
The essence of fiction. It creates plot. The conflicts we encounter can usually be identified as one of four
kinds. (Man versusMan, Nature, Society, or Self)
Rising Action
A series of events that builds from the conflict. It begins with the inciting force and ends with the climax.
Crisis
The conflict reaches a turning point. At this point the opposing forces in the story meet and the conflict
becomes most intense. The crisis occurs before or at the same time as the climax.
Climax
The climax is the result of the crisis. It is the high point of the story for the reader. Frequently, it is the
moment of the highest interest and greatest emotion. The point at which the outcome of the conflict can be
predicted.
Falling Action
The events after the climax which close the story.
Resolution (Denouement)
Rounds out and concludes the action.
Climax is the turning point or high point in a story where the action changes. It usually involves an important
discovery, decision or event.
Resolution happens at the end of the story when the problem is resolved.
Foreshadowing is a hint of what is to happen in a story. It causes suspense.
Point Of View Point of view refers to how the story is told. Who is telling the story? Why are they telling it? A story can
be told by a distant third person, a mere observer who may or may not have privileged access to characters thoughts
and feelings. We call this kind of a narrator an omniscient or limited omniscient narrator, depending on how much
they know about the characters. There are also first-person narrators who tell their own stories in their own voices.
Point of View is the way an author chooses to tell (narrate) a story. It is sometimes called voice. There are two
types of point of view:
o A story can be narrated by a character. This is called first person point of view. The words "I" and
"we" are used by the narrator.
o A story can be told by a nameless central observer outside the story. This is called third person point
of view. The words "he" and "she" are used by the narrator.
Questions to ask...
Consider how point of view affects your response to the characters. How would the story change if another character
told the story?


A first-person narrator is not always trustworthy or reliable. How do we determine the narrators reliability? How does
the desire, values, beliefs, and attitudes of the first-person narrator shape what he or she relates. Again, how would the
story change if another character told the story?
Do we have multiple perspectives or multiple narrators? How do these narrators shape the way we see the events in
the story?
What is gained or lost by switching the narration from first to third person?

First Person
The narrator is a character in the story who can reveal only personal thoughts and feelings and what he or she sees and is
told by other characters. He cant tell us thoughts of other characters.
Third-Person Objective
The narrator is an outsider who can report only what he or she sees and hears. This narrator can tell us what is
happening, but he cant tell us the thoughts of the characters.
Third-Person Limited
The narrator is an outsider who sees into the mind of one of the characters.
Omniscient
The narrator is an all-knowing outsider who can enter the minds of more than one of the characters.

In literature, the perspective from which a story is told. There are two general divisions of point of view and many
subdivisions within those. (1) The first person narrator tells the story with the first person pronoun, I, and is a character
in the story. This narrator can be the protagonist (the hero or heroine), a participant (a character in a secondary role), or
an observer (a character who merely watches the action). (2) The third person narrator relates the events with the third
person pronouns, he, she, and it. There are two main subdivisions to be aware of : omniscient and limited omniscient.
In the third person omniscient point of view, the narrator, with godlike knowledge, presents the thoughts and actions
of any or all characters. This all-knowing narrator can reveal what each character feels and thinks at any given moment.
The third person limited omniscient point of view, as its name implies, presents the feelings and thoughts of only one
character, presenting only the actions of all remaining characters. This definition applies in questions in the multiple-
choice section. However, on the essay portion of the exam, the term point of view carries a different meaning. When
youre asked to analyze an authors point of view, the appropriate point for you to address is the authors attitude.
Predicate adjective One type of subject complementan adjective, group of adjectives, or adjective clause that follows
a linking verb. It is in the predicate of the sentence, and modifies, or describes, the subject. For example, in the
sentence My boyfriend is tall, dark, and handsome, the group of predicate adjectives (tall, dark, and handsome)
describes boyfriend.
Predicate nominative A second type of subject complementa noun, group of nouns, or noun clause that renames
the subject. It, like the predicate adjective, follows a linking verb and is located in the predicate of the sentence. For
example, in the sentence Abe Lincoln was a man of integrity, the predicate nominative is man of integrity, as it
renames Abe Lincoln. Occasionally, this term or the term predicate adjective appears in a multiple-choice question.
Prose One of the major divisions of genre, prose refers to fiction and nonfiction, including all its forms, because they
are written in ordinary language and most closely resemble everyday speech. Technically, anything that isnt poetry or
drama is prose. Therefore, all passages in the language exam are prose. Of course, prose writers often borrow poetic
and dramatic elements.

Pseudonym A "false name" or alias used by a writer desiring not to use his or her real name. Sometimes called a nom de
plume or "pen name," pseudonyms have been popular for several reasons.
First, political realities might make it dangerous for the real author to admit to a work. Beatings, imprisonment, and even
execution are not unheard of for authors of unpopular works.


Second, an author might have a certain type of work associated with a certain name, so that different names are used for
different kinds of work. One pen name might be used for westerns, while another name would be used for science
fiction.
Lastly, an author might choose a literary name that sounds more impressive or that will garner more respect than the
author's real name. Examples:
Samuel Clemens used the name Mark Twain
Mary Ann Evans used the name George Eliot
Jonathan Swift used the name Lemuel Gulliver (once)
Pulp fiction Novels written for the mass market, intended to be "a good read,"--often exciting, titillating, thrilling.
Historically they have been very popular but critically sneered at as being of sub-literary quality. The earliest ones were
the dime novels of the nineteenth century, printed on newsprint (hence "pulp" fiction) and sold for ten cents. Westerns,
stories of adventure, even the Horatio Alger novels, all were forms of pulp fiction.
Regional novel A novel faithful to a particular geographic region and its people, including behavior, customs, speech,
and history. Examples:
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native
Repetition The duplication, either exact or approximate, of any element of language, such as sound, word, phrase,
clause, sentence, or grammatical pattern. When repetition is poorly done, it bores, but when it is well done, it links and
emphasizes ideas while allowing the reader the comfort of recognizing something familiar.

Resources of language The techniques of language an author may use to accomplish his purpose. These techniques
include diction, imagery, detail, figurative language, sentence structure, and syntax. The cumulative effect of a work is
produced by the resources of language a writer chooses.
Rhetoric From the Greek for orator, this term describes the principles governing the art of writing effectively,
eloquently, and persuasively.

Rhetorical features The tools of rhetoric, such as tone, diction, and imagery.

Rhetorical modes This flexible term describes the variety, the conventions, and the purposes of the major kinds of
writing. The four most common rhetorical modes and their purposes are as follows: (1) The purpose of exposition (or
expository writing) is to explain and analyze information by presenting an idea, relevant evidence, and appropriate
discussion. The language exam essay questions are frequently set up as expository topics. (2) The purpose of
argumentation is to prove the validity of an idea, or point of view, by presenting sound reasoning, discussion, and
argument that thoroughly convince the reader. Persuasive writing is a type of argumentation having an additional aim of
urging some form of action. (3) The purpose of description is to re-create, invent, or visually present a person, place,
event, or action so that the reader can picture that being described. Sometimes an author engages all five senses in
description; good descriptive writing may be straightforward and objective or highly emotional and subjective. (4) The
purpose of narration is to tell a story or narrate an event or series of events. This writing mode frequently uses the tools
of descriptive writing. These four writing modes are sometimes referred to as the modes of discourse.

Rhetorical structure This phrase refers to how a passage is constructed. If asked to consider rhetorical structure, look
at the passages organization and how the writer combines images, details, or argument to serve his or her purpose.

Rhetorical techniques Devices of effective or persuasive language, such as contrast, repetition, rhetorical question,
paradox, understatement, syllogism, and the many strategies of argument discussed in a speech textbook.


Rhetorical question A question asked for effect, not in expectation of a reply. No reply is expected because the
question presupposes only one possible answer. The lover of Sucklings Shall I wasting in despair/Die because a ladys
fair? has already decided the answer is no.

Rhyme. The similarity between syllable sounds at the end of two or more lines. Some kinds of rhyme (also spelled rime)
include:
Couplet: a pair of lines rhyming consecutively.
Eye rhyme: words whose spellings would lead one to think that they rhymed (slough, tough, cough, bough,
though, hiccough. Or: love, move, prove. Or: daughter, laughter.)
Feminine rhyme: two syllable rhyme consisting of stressed syllable followed by unstressed.
Masculine rhyme: similarity between terminally stressed syllables.
Ridicule Words intended to belittle a person or idea and arouse contemptuous laughter. The goal is to condemn or
criticize by making the thing, idea, or person seem laughable and ridiculous. It is one of the most powerful methods of
criticism, partly because it cannot be satisfactorily answered ("Who can refute a sneer?") and partly because many people
who fear nothing else--not the law, not society, not even God--fear being laughed at. (The fear of being laughed at is one
of the most inhibiting forces in western civilization. It provides much of the power behind the adolescent flock urge and
accounts for many of the barriers to change and adventure in the adult world.) Ridicule is, not surprisingly, a common
weapon of the satirist.
Roman a clef [French for "novel with a key," pronounced roh MAHN ah CLAY] A novel in which historical events
and actual people are written about under the pretense of being fiction. Examples:
Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Romance An extended fictional prose narrative about improbable events involving characters that are quite different
from ordinary people. Knights on a quest for a magic sword and aided by characters like fairies and trolls would be
examples of things found in romance fiction. Examples:
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Sir Philip Sidney, The Arcadia
In popular use, the modern romance novel is a formulaic love story (boy meets girl, obstacles interfere, they overcome
obstacles, they live happily ever after). Computer software is available for constructing these stock plots and providing
stereotyped characters. Consequently, the books usually lack literary merit. Examples:
Harlequin Romance series
Sarcasm A form of sneering criticism in which disapproval is often expressed as ironic praise. (Oddly enough, sarcastic
remarks are often used between friends, perhaps as a somewhat perverse demonstration of the strength of the bond--
only a good friend could say this without hurting the other's feelings, or at least without excessively damaging the
relationship, since feelings are often hurt in spite of a close relationship. If you drop your lunch tray and a stranger says,
"Well, that was really intelligent," that's sarcasm. If your girlfriend or boyfriend says it, that's love--I think.)

From the Greek meaning to tear flesh, sarcasm involves bitter, caustic language that is meant to hurt or ridicule
someone or something. It may use irony as a device, but not all ironic statements are sarcastic, that is, intending to
ridicule. When well done, sarcasm can be witty and insightful; when poorly done, its simply cruel.


Satire A literary mode based on criticism of people and society through ridicule. The satirist aims to reduce the practices
attacked by laughing scornfully at them--and being witty enough to allow the reader to laugh, also. Ridicule, irony,
exaggeration, and several other techniques are almost always present. The satirist may insert serious statements of value
or desired behavior, but most often he relies on an implicit moral code, understood by his audience and paid lip service
by them. The satirist's goal is to point out the hypocrisy of his target in the hope that either the target or the audience
will return to a real following of the code. Thus, satire is inescapably moral even when no explicit values are promoted in
the work, for the satirist works within the framework of a widely spread value system. Many of the techniques of satire
are devices of comparison, to show the similarity or contrast between two things. A list of incongruous items, an
oxymoron, metaphors, and so forth are examples.
A work that targets human vices and follies or social institutions and conventions for reform or ridicule. Regardless of
whether or not the work aims to reform humans or their society, satire is best seen as a style of writing rather than a
purpose for writing. It can be recognized by the many devices used effectively by the satirist, such as irony, wit, parody,
caricature, hyperbole, understatement, and sarcasm. The effects of satire are varied, depending on the writers goal, but
good satire, often humorous, is thought provoking and insightful about the human condition.

Scene A small unit of a play in which there is no shift of locale or time.
Science fiction novel A novel in which futuristic technology or otherwise altered scientific principles contribute in a
significant way to the adventures. Often the novel assumes a set of rules or principles or facts and then traces their
logical consequences in some form. For example, given that a man discovers how to make himself invisible, what might
happen? Examples:
H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Semantics The branch of linguistics that studies the meaning of words, their historical and psychological development,
their connotations, and their relation to one another.

Sentence structure When an essay question asks you to analyze sentence structure, look at the type of sentences the
author uses. Remember that the basic sentence structures are simple, compound, and complex and variations created
with sentence combining. Also consider variation or lack of it in sentence length, any unusual devices in sentence
construction, such as repetition or inverted word order, and any unusual word or phrase placement. As with all devices,
be prepared to discuss the effect of the sentence structure. For example, a series of short, simple sentences or phrases
can produce a feeling of speed and choppiness, which may suit the authors purpose.

Sentimental novel A type of novel, popular in the eighteenth century, that overemphasizes emotion and seeks to create
emotional responses in the reader. The type also usually features an overly optimistic view of the goodness of human
nature. Examples:
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton
Style The way an author uses language to convey his ideas. An authors style includes his diction, syntax, imagery,
figurative language, selection of detail, and tone. The consideration of style has two purposes. (1) An evaluation of the
sum of the choices an author makes in blending diction, syntax, figurative language, and other literary devices. Some
authors styles are so idiosyncratic that we can quickly recognize works by the same author (or a writer emulating that
authors style). Compare, for example, Jonathan Swift to George Orwell or William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway.


We can analyze and describe an authors personal style and make judgments how appropriate it is to an authors purpose.
Styles can be called flowery, explicit, succinct, rambling, bombastic, commonplace, incisive, or laconic, to name only a
few examples. (2) Classification of authors to a group and comparison of an author to similar authors. By means of
such classification and comparison, one can see how an authors style reflects and helps to define a historical period,
such as the Renaissance or the Victorian period, or a literary movement, such as the romantic, transcendental, or realist
movement.

Sequel A novel incorporating the same characters and often the same setting as a previous novel. Sometimes the events
and situations involve a continuation of the previous novel and sometimes only the characters are the same and the
events are entirely unrelated to the previous novel. When sequels result from the popularity of an original, they are often
hastily written and not of the same quality as the original. Occasionally a sequel is written by an author different from
that of the original novel. See series. Examples:
Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Detective
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett
Series Several novels related to each other, by plot, setting, character, or all three. Book marketers like to refer to multi-
volume novels as sagas. Examples:
Anthony Trollope, Barsetshire novels
C. S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia novels
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea novels
James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales
Setting The total environment for the action of a fictional work. Setting includes time period (such as the 1890's), the
place (such as downtown Warsaw), the historical milieu (such as during the Crimean War), as well as the social, political,
and perhaps even spiritual realities. The setting is usually established primarily through description, though narration is
used also.
The location and time of a story is what we call setting. Setting is vital because the physical details of time and place
often have metaphorical value. That is, the setting is associated with values, ideals, attitudes, and beliefs. Setting reflects
character and embodies theme. (i.e. in Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now, the journey up river is a journey to
the most primitive and dark side of humanity. The journey is literal and metaphorical.). Setting can also convey the
emotional or psychological state of characters. For example, the collapse of Roderick Ushers house coincides with the
final stages of his insanity, as well as the annihilation of his posterity. Put another way, setting can be the external
manifestation of inner realities.
Setting is the time and place in which the events in a story take place. There are two types of setting:
o integral - necessary for the story, playing a real part in the plot
o backdrop - vague, not clear, serving only as a background for the story
Keep in mind...
How does the setting orient or provide context?
Who and what is associated with what time and place?
What is metaphorical about the time and place of the events?
Are places and times opposed or contrasted with each other? If so, what values, beliefs, and attitudes are associated
with each location or time?


Simile A figure of speech that states a comparison between two essentially unlike things which are similar in one aspect.
Similes are introduced by like or as. Example: "His virtues / Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued, against / The deep
damnation of his taking-off."

Soliloquy A speech given by a character alone on the stage. The purpose of a soliloquy is
to let the audience know what the character is thinking and feeling.
Sonnet A fourteen line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, with a varied rhyme scheme. The two main types of sonnet
are the Petrarchan (or Italian) and the Shakespearean. The Petrarchan Sonnet is divided into two main sections, the octave
(first eight lines) and the sestet (last six lines). The octave presents a problem or situation which is then resolved or
commented on in the sestet. The most common rhyme scheme is A-B-B-A A-B-B-A C-D-E C-D-E, though there is
flexibility in the sestet, such as C-D-C D-C-D.
The Shakespearean Sonnet, (perfected though, not invented by Shakespeare), contains three quatrains and a couplet, with
more rhymes (because of the greater difficulty finding rhymes in English). The most common rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B
C-D-C-D E-F-E-F G-G. In Shakespeare, the couplet often undercuts the thought created in the rest of the poem.
Spenserian Stanza A nine-line stanza, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic
hexameter (called an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B B-C-B-C C. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is written
in Spenserian stanzas.
Style The manner of expression of a particular writer, produced by choice of words, grammatical structures, use of
literary devices, and all the possible parts of language use. Some general styles might include scientific, ornate, plain,
emotive. Most writers have their own particular styles.
Stylistic devices An essay question that mentions stylistic devices is asking you to note and analyze all of the elements
in language that contribute to style, such as diction, syntax, tone, attitude, figures of speech, connotations, and repetition.

Subject complement The word (with any accompanying phrases) or clause that follows a linking verb and
complements, or completes, the subject of the sentence by either (1) renaming it or (2) describing it. The former is
technically called a predicate nominative, the latter a predicate adjective. See predicate nominative and predicate adjective for
examples of sentences. This term is occasionally used in a multiple-choice question.

Subordinate clause Like all clauses, this word group contains both a subject and a verb (plus any accompanying
phrases or modifiers), but unlike the independent clause, the subordinate clause cannot stand alone; it does not express a
complete thought. Also called a dependent clause, the subordinate clause depends on a main clause, sometimes called an
independent clause, to complete its meaning. Easily recognized key words and phrases usually begin these clausesfor
example: although, because, unless, if, even though, since, as soon as, while, who, when, where, how, and that.
Subplot A subordinate or minor collection of events in a novel or drama. Most subplots have some connection with the
main plot, acting as foils to, commentary on, complications of, or support to the theme of, the main plot. Sometimes
two opening subplots merge into a main plot.
Syllogism From the Greek for reckoning together, a syllogism (or syllogistic reasoning) is a deductive system of
formal logic that presents two premises (the first one called major and the second minor) that inevitably lead to a
sound conclusion. A frequently cited example proceeds as follows:

major premise: All men are mortal.
minor premise: Socrates is a man.
conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is a mortal.


A syllogisms conclusion is valid only if each of the two premises is valid. Syllogisms may also present the specific idea
first (Socrates) and the general second (All men).

Symbol/symbolism Generally, anything that represents, stands for, something else. Usually, a symbol is something
concretesuch as an object, action, character or scenethat represents something more abstract. However, symbols
and symbolism can be much more complex. One system classifies symbols in three categories: (1) Natural symbols use
objects and occurrences from nature to represent ideas commonly associated with them (dawn symbolizing hope or a
new beginning, a rose symbolizing love, a tree symbolizing knowledge). (2) Conventional symbols are those that have
been invested with meaning by a group (religious symbols, such as a cross or Star of David; national symbols, such as a
flag or an eagle; or group symbols, such as a skull and crossbones for pirates or the scales of justice for lawyers). (3)
Literary symbols are sometimes also conventional in the sense that they are found in a variety of works and are generally
recognized. However, a works symbols may be more complicated as is the whale in Moby Dick and the jungle in Heart of
Darkness. On the exam, try to determine what abstraction an object is a symbol for and to what extent it is successful in
representing that abstraction.

Syntax The way an author chooses to join words into phrases, clauses, and sentences. Syntax is similar to diction, but
you can differentiate them by thinking of syntax as the groups of words, while diction refers to the individual words. In
the multiple-choice section of the language exam, expect to be asked some questions about how an author manipulates
syntax. In the essay section, you will need to analyze how syntax produces effects.
Symbol Something that on the surface is its literal self but which also has another meaning or even several meanings.
For example, a sword may be a sword and also symbolize justice. A symbol may be said to embody an idea. There are
two general types of symbols: universal symbols that embody universally recognizable meanings wherever used, such as
light to symbolize knowledge, a skull to symbolize death, etc., and constructed symbols that are given symbolic meaning
by the way an author uses them in a literary work, as the white whale becomes a symbol of evil in Moby Dick.
Theme Theme has to do with what you see as the storys point, message, function, or implied view of life and conduct.
The theme is always a generalization gathered from the collective effect of all elements of a story. Keep in mind that
there is always a tendency to oversimplify when we come up with a theme in that we reduce a complicated story to a
mere moral or message. Remember that there are always multiple themes that often reinforce and even contradict
each other. Never reduce reading to a lets find the theme in this story kind of game because it assumes that there is a
right theme to find. Instead, enjoy the pleasure of making compelling connections and the responsibility that comes
from questioning and critiquing an authors attitude, belief system, values, and ideological affiliation.
Theme is the truth about life or the unifying idea which the author is trying to make the reader see.
Please keep in mind as well that stories convey more than the authors intentions. For example, we are all aware that we
can have racist or sexist attitudes despite our best claims to the contrary. Unconscious desires and attitudes or personal
and cultural backgrounds can surface in subtle and strange ways, so please dont limit your reading to the authors
supposed intentions, even when authors explicitly assert that they did not mean that or another reader insists that the
author surely wasnt thinking about that.
A good example of this authorial desire to control the interpretation of ones work is W. D. Griffiths film Birth of a
Nation in which Griffith portrays the Ku Klux Klan as glorious heroes who save the South from the lecherous, lazy, and
rabble-rousing Negroes. The showing of the film eventually led to a few riots, and Griffiths own maid quit in disgust.
Despite all of this, Griffith maintained that he was trying to promote racial equality. Do we just brush aside what we see
because of what Griffith said? We may excuse him morally (i.e. he may not have been an evil or malicious guyhe just
didnt know any better(?!)) but that doesnt mean Griffiths representations were any less racist, demeaning, or
dehumanizing.
A theme may be stated or implied. Theme differs from the subject or topic of a literary work in that it involves a
statement or opinion about the topic. Not every literary work has a theme. Themes may be major or minor. A major


theme is an idea the author returns to time and again. It becomes one of the most important ideas in the story. Minor
themes are ideas that may appear from time to time.
It is important to recognize the difference between the theme of a literary work and the subject of a literary work. The
subject is the topic on which an author has chosen to write. The theme, however, makes some statement about or
expresses some opinion on that topic. For example, the subject of a story might be war while the theme might be the
idea that war is useless.
Four ways in which an author can express themes are as follows:
1. Themes are expressed and emphasized by the way the author makes us feel.. By sharing feelings of the main
character you also share the ideas that go through his mind.
2. Themes are presented in thoughts and conversations. Authors put words in their characters mouths only for good
reasons. One of these is to develop a storys themes. The things a person says are much on their mind. Look for
thoughts that are repeated throughout the story.
3. Themes are suggested through the characters. The main character usually illustrates the most important theme of the
story. A good way to get at this theme is to ask yourself the question, what does the main character learn in the
course of the story?
4. The actions or events in the story are used to suggest theme. People naturally express ideas and feelings through
their actions. One thing authors think about is what an action will "say". In other words, how will the action express an
idea or theme?

The central idea or message of a work, the insight it offers into life. A main thought expressed by the work, also called
the meaning of the work as a whole.

Thesis The theme, meaning, or position in non-fiction that a writer undertakes to prove or support. Usually it is stated
in one sentence.

Tone Similar to mood, tone describes the manner in which the author express his attitude toward his material, the
audience, or both. Tone is easier to determine in spoken language than in written language. Considering how a work
would sound if it were read aloud can help in identifying an authors tone. Tone is the result of the combination of
choices the author makes in his use of language. Tone may shift during a work, or even during brief sections of a work.
Some words describing tone are playful, serious, businesslike, sarcastic, humorous, formal, ornate, and somber.

The writer's attitude toward his readers and his subject; his mood or moral view. A writer can be formal, informal,
playful, ironic, and especially, optimistic or pessimistic. While both Swift and Pope are satirizing much the same subjects,
there is a profound difference in their tone.

Tragedy A type of drama of human conflict which ends in defeat and suffering. Often the main character (dignified,
noble) has a tragic flaw (weakness of character, wrong judgment) which leads to his or her destruction. Sometimes the
conflict is with forces beyond the control of the character-fate, evil in the world.

Transition A word or phrase that links different ideas. Used especially, although not exclusively, in expository and
argumentative writing, transitions effectively signal a shift from one idea to another. A few commonly used transitional
words or phrases are furthermore, consequently, nevertheless, for example, in addition, likewise, similarly, and on the
contrary.
Travesty A work that treats a serious subject frivolously-- ridiculing the dignified. Often the tone is mock serious and
heavy handed.


Understatement The ironic minimizing of fact, understatement presents something as less significant than it is. The
effect can frequently be humorous and emphatic. Understatement is the opposite of hyperbole.
Utopian novel A novel that presents an ideal society where the problems of poverty, greed, crime, and so forth have
been eliminated. Examples:
Thomas More, Utopia
Samuel Butler, Erewhon
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

Verisimilitude How fully the characters and actions in a work of fiction conform to our sense of reality. To say that a
work has a high degree of verisimilitude means that the work is very realistic and believable--it is "true to life.".
Versification Generally, the structural form of a verse, as revealed by scansion. Identification of verse structure includes
the name of the metrical type and the name designating number of feet:
Monometer: 1 foot
Dimeter: 2 feet
Trimeter: 3 feet
Tetrameter: 4 feet
Pentameter: 5 feet
Hexameter: 6 feet
Heptameter: 7 feet
Octameter: 8 feet
Nonameter: 9 feet
The most common verse in English poetry is iambic pentameter. See foot for more information.

Viewpoint The attitude of the narrating persona toward events, other characters, or ideas. A shift of viewpoint may
enhance meaning. Viewpoint may shift because of a characters place in time (In A Separate Peace, the older Gene sees
events differently from the sixteen-year-old Gene, and even comments on the misperceptions of his younger self) or
because of a change in understanding (In Cheevers Reunion, the narrating son sees the real nature of his father
emerge to contradict the sons childhood image of him and to warn the son of his own future).

Wit In modern usage, intellectually amusing language that surprises and delights. A witty statement is humorous, while
suggesting the speakers verbal power in creating ingenious and perceptive remarks. Wit usually uses terse language that
makes a pointed statement. Historically, wit originally meant basic understanding. Its meaning evolved to include speed
of understanding, and finally (in the early seventeenth century), it grew to mean quick perception including creative
fancy.
Western A novel set in the western United States featuring the experiences of cowboys and frontiersmen. Many are little
more than adventure novels or even pulp fiction, but some have literary value. Examples:
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident
Owen Wister, The Virginian


XXIV. Appendix III: A Vocabulary of Attitudes



A Vocabulary of Attitudes

Students sometimes feel vaguely the correct attitude toward what they are reading, but are unable to clarify and intensify
the mood because they l ack a vocabulary adequate to describe it. To such students the following list of attitudes
should prove helpful.

Attitudes chiefly rational: explanatory, instructive, didactic, admonitory, condemnatory, indignant, puzzled, curious,
wistful, guileless, thoughtl ess, innocent, frank, sincere, questioning, uncertain, doubting, incredulous, critical, cynical,
insinuating, persuading, coaxing, pleading, persuasive, argumentative, oracular.

Attitudes of pleasure: peaceful, satisfied, contented, happy, cheerful, pleasant, bright, sprightly, joyful, playful, jubilant,
elated, enraptured.

Attitudes of pain: worried, uneasy, troubled, disappointed, regretful, vexed, annoyed, bored, disgusted, miserable, cheerless,
mournful, sorrowful, sad, dismal, melancholy, plaintive, fretful, querulous, irritable, sore, sour, sulky, sullen bitter, crushed,
pathetic, tragic.

Attitudes of passion: nervous, hysterical, impulsive, impetuous, reckless, desperate, frantic, wild, fierce, surious, savage, enraged,
angry, hungry, greedy, jealous, insane.

Attitudes of friendliness: cordial, sociable, gracious, kindly, sympathetic, compassionate, forgiving, pitying, indulgent, tolerant,
comforting, soothing, tender, loving caressing, solicitous, accommodating, approving, helpful, obliging, courteous,
polite, confiding, trusting.

Attitudes of unfriendliness: sharp, severe, cutting, hateful, unsocial, spiteful, harsh, boorish, pitiless, disparaging, derisive,
scornful, satiric sarcastic, insolent, insulting, impudent, belittling, contemptuous, accusing, reproving, scolding, suspicious.

Attitudes of comedy: facetious, comic, ironic, satiric, amused, mocking, playful, humorous, hilarious, uproarious.

Attitudes of animation: lively, eager, excited, earnest, energetic, vigorous, hearty, ardent, passionate, rapturous, ecstatic, feverish,
inspired, exalted, breathless, hasty, brisk, crisp, hopeful...


Attitudes of apathy : inert, sluggish, languid, dispassionate, dull, colorless, indifferent, stoical, resigned,
defeated, helpless, hopeless, dry, monotonous, vacant, feeble, dreaming, bored, blas, sophisticated.
Attitudes of self: importance, impressive, profound, proud, dignified, lofty, imperious, confident, egotistical,
peremptory, bombastic, sententious, arrogant, pompous, stiff, boastful, exultant, insolent,. domineering, flippant, saucy,
positive, resolute, haughty, condescending, challenging, bold, defiant, contemptuous, assured knowing, cocksure.


XXV. Appenxix IV: Concepts for Literature



Concepts for Literature

admiration discrimination hypocrisy mourning rights
affection disgust hysteria music ritual
alienation dishonesty ideal mystery romance
ambition disillusionment illusion nature sacrifice
anger domination immaturity nostalgia sadness
apathy doubt immorality opposition savagery
appearance vs. reality drama incredulity optimism scapegoat
apprehension dreams independence origins scorn
arrogance duty indignation outrage search for identity
authority education individualism paradise sensuality
awe egoism initiation parenthood sentiment
beliefs/values elation injustice passion serenity
belligerence emotions innocence patriotism seriousness
betrayal empathy insolence patterns shock
bitterness enthusiasm instinct peace sin
blame envy instruction peer pressure sincerity
boldness escape integrity perceptions sobriety
bureaucracy eternity interaction perseverance social status
caring ethics intimacy persistence society
caution evil intolerance pessimism spirituality
ceremony exile irony poverty sports
chance failure irreverence power strangers
childhood faith/loss of faith isolation prejudice supernatural
children falsity jealousy pretense suppression
civilization fantasy journey pride survival
comedy fate joy progress suspicion
compassion fear judgment prophecy sympathy
confidence feminism justice punishment tenderness
conflict free will law rational thought thought
contempt friendship logic rebellion threat
contentedness games loneliness reflection time
contests gender roles longing regret tolerance
cooperation greed love rejection traditions/customs
courage guilt loyalty relaxation tragedy
cowardice happiness luck religion tranquility
cruelty hate lust repentance tricks
curiosity heart vs. reason malice resignation urgency
cynicism heaven masculinity resistance utopia
dance heritage materialism respect vengeance
death heroism maturity responsibility victim
defeat home meditation restraint violence


despair honesty memory retribution war
disappointment honor mob psychology revenge whimsy
disbelief hope morality reverence wildness
discontent hopelessness motivation ridicule will power


XXVI. Appendix VI: Suggested Stories for
Additional Reading



Suggested Stories For Additional Reading
Adapted from: http://members.multimania.co.uk/shortstories/

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)
o A Story of Ravenna
Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616)
o The Spanish-English Lady
E. T. A. Hoffman (1776-1822)
o The Cremona Violin
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
o Governor Manco and the Soldier
o The Stout Gentleman
o The Adventure of the German
Student
o The Specter Bridegroom
o Rip Van Winkle
o The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
o The Widow and Her Son
o The Devil and Tom Walker Good
Choice!!!!!
Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867)
o Fanny McDermot
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
o The Lake Gun
John Polidori (1795-1821)
o The Vampyre
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
o The Mortal Immortal
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
o La Grande Breteche
o The Red Inn
o The Atheist's Mass
Alexander Pushkin(1799-1837)
o The Queen of Spades
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
o Zodmirsky's Duel
o Solange: Dr. Ledrus Story of the
Reign of Terror
Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
o A Fight with a Cannon
Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)
o Slavery's Pleasant Homes
o The Quadroons
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
o My Kinsman, Major Molineux
o Young Goodman Brown
o The Birth-mark
o Rappaccinis Daughter
o The Ministers Black Veil
o The May-Pole of Merry Mount
o The Snow-Image
o Lady Eleanore's Mantle
o Alice Doan's Appeal
o Ethan Brand
o Wakefield
o The Gentle Boy
o Endicott and the Red Cross
o Feathertop
o The Gray Champion
o The Great Carbuncle
o The Great Stone Face
o The Ambitious Guest
o The Wives of the Dead
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852)
o The Overcoat
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
o The Murders in the Rue Morgue
o The Gold-Bug
o The Tell-Tale Heart
o The Cask of Amontillado
o Ligeia
o The Black Cat
o MS. Found in a Bottle
o The Fall of the House of Usher
o The Masque of the Red Death
o The Purloined Letter
o William Wilson
o The Pit and the Pendulum
o The Imp of the Perverse
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865)
o The Manchester Marriage
o Half-Brothers
o The Old Nurse's Story
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
o The Ghost in the Mill
o Miss Asphyxia
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
o The Schoolboy's Story
o A Christmas Carol
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873)
o Dickon the Devil
o The Murdered Cousin
o Squire Toby's Will
o Laura Silver Bell
o An Account of Some Strange
Disturbances in Aungier Street


Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1815-1852)
o The Angel Over the Right Shoulder
o Calico
o Night-Watchers
Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815-1878)
o The Big Bear of Arkansas
Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)
o Yermolai and the Miller's Wife
George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans] (1819-1880)
o Brother Jacob
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
o The Lightning-Rod Man
o The Piazza
o Bartleby, the Scrivener
o Billy Budd, Foretopman
o I and My Chimney
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
o The Thief
o Notes From Underground
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
o A Simple Heart
Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823-1902)
o Lemorne Versus Huell
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)
o A Terribly Strange Bed
Henry Clay Lewis (1825-1850)
o The Indefatigable Bear-Hunter
o Love in a Garden
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)
o The Two Offers
Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892)
o Miss Lucinda
o Dely's Cow
o About Dolly
o Grit
Fitz-James O'Brien (1828-1862)
o What Was It? Good Choice!!!!!
o My Wife's Tempter
o The Diamond Lens
o The Golden Ingot
o The Wondersmith
o The Child Who Loved A Grave
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
o The Death of Ivan Ilych
o How Much Land Does a Man Need?
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916)
o Krambambuli
Amelia B. Edwards (1831-1892)
o The Phantom Coach
o The Four-Fifteen Express
Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910)
o Life in the Iron-Mills
o The Wife's Story
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
o Transcendental Wild Oats
o How I Went Out to Service
o The Blue and the Gray
o A Modern Cinderella: Or, The Little
Old Shoe
Frank Stockton (1834-1902)
o The Lady or the Tiger
o The Griffin and the Minor Canon
o The Widow's Cruise
o My Unwilling Neighbor
o A Piece of Red Calico
o Love Before Breakfast
o Captain Eli's Best Ear
o The Christmas Wreck
Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921)
o Circumstance
o Moonstone Mass
o In a Cellar
o The Mad Lady
o The Nemesis of Motherhood
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
o The Notorious Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County
o The Private History of a Campaign
That Failed
o The Story of the Old Ram
o The Californian's Tale
o The Story of the Bad Boy Who
Didn't Come to Grief
o The Mysterious Stranger
o The Facts Concerning the Recent
Carnival of Crime in Connecticut
Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907)
o Marjorie Daw
o Quite So
Bret Harte (1836-1902)
o The Iliad of Sandy Bar
o The Luck of Roaring Camp
o Tennessees Partner
o The Outcasts of Poker Flat
o The Idyll of Red Gulch
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
o Editha
Villiers de lIsle-Adam (1838-1889)
o The Torture of Hope
o Vera
o Olympe and Henrietta
o The Desire to be a Man
Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897)
o The Last Lesson
Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894)


o Peter, the Parson
o Felipa
o Miss Grief
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
o Squire Petrick's Lady
o An Imaginative Woman
o The Grave by the Handpost
o Old Mrs Chundle Good Choice!!!!!
Giovanni Verga (1840-1922)
o Cavalleria Rusticana
o The Saint Joseph's Ass
Emile Zola (1840-1902)
o The Death of Olivier Becaille
o Rentafoil
o Big Michu
W. H. Hudson (1841-1922)
o Story of a Piebald Horse
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
o The Damned Thing
o An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
o One of the Missing
o One Summer Night
o A Horseman in the Sky
o What I Saw of Shiloh
o George Thurston
o Killed at Resaca
o Chickamauga
Henry James (1843-1916)
o The Sweetheart Of M. Briseux
o Daisy Miller: A Study
o The Beast in the Jungle
o The Great Good Place
o The Story in it
o The Real Thing
Anatole France (1844-1924) Awarded Nobel
Prize in Literature 1921
o The Procurator of Judea
o The Mass of Shadows
George Washington Cable (1844-1925)
o Belles Demoiselles Plantation
o Caf des Exils
o "Posson Jone'"
o Jean-ah Poquelin
o 'Tite Poulette
o 'Sieur George
o Madame Dlicieuse
Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
o Dracula's Guest
o The Secret of the Growing Gold
Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938)
o Maverick
o Friend Barton's Concern
Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908)
o Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
o A White Heron
o Miss Tempy's Watchers
o The Hiltons' Holiday
o The Foreigner
o The Flight of Betsey Lane
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
o Markheim
o The Bottle Imp
o The Body-Snatcher
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
o The Necklace
o The Jewels of M. Lantin
o The Trip of the Horla
o The Grave
Charles Egbert Craddock [Mary Noailles
Murfree] 1850-1922
o The Dancin' Party at Harrison's
Cove
Ella D'Arcy (1851-1939)
o A Marriage
o The Death Mask
Kate Chopin (1851-1904)
o At The 'Cadian Ball
o The Storm [A Sequel to "At the
'Cadian Ball"]
o Regret Good Choice!!!!!
o Ozme's Holiday
o At Chnire Caminada
o The Story of an Hour
o A Respectable Woman
o A Night in Acadie
o Dsire's Baby
o Ripe Figs
o Madame Clestin's Divorce
Grace King (1852-1932)
o The Little Convent Girl
o La Grande Demoiselle
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)
o The Revolt of "Mother"
o A New England Nun
o A Church Mouse
o Old Woman Magoun
o The Lost Ghost
o A Mistaken Charity
o One Good Time
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
o Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
o The Canterville Ghost
Harold Frederic (1856-1898)
o The Eve of the Fourth
George Gissing (1857-1903)


o The Foolish Virgin
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
o The Lagoon
o The Inn of the Two WitchesA
Find
o Youth
o The Secret Sharer
o Heart of Darkness
Charles A. Eastman (1858-1939)
o The Madness of Bald Eagle
Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932)
o The Sheriff's Children
o The Goophered Grapevine
o Po' Sandy
o Dave's Neckliss
o The Wife of His Youth
George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne
Bright] (1859-1945)
o Wedlock
o A Little Grey Glove Good
Choice!!!!!
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
o A Scandal in Bohemia
o The Red-Headed League
o A Case of Identity
o The Adventure of the Bruce-
Partington Plans
o The Adventure of the Speckled
Band
o The Final Problem
o The Adventure of the Empty House
o The Parasite
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
o The Darling
o Misery Good Choice!!!!!
o The Lady with the Dog
o About Love
o Anna on the Neck
o Gooseberries
o The Grasshopper
o Gusev
o The Huntsman
o The Kiss
o The Teacher of Literature
o The Man in a Case
o The Party
o Peasants
o Oh! the Public
o In the Ravine
o Sleepy
o Small Fry
o The Student
o Vanka
o Ward No. 6
Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)
o Under the Lion's Paw
o The Return of a Private
o Up the Coulee
o A Branch Road
o Among the Corn Rows
o The Creamery Man
o Uncle Ethan Ripley
o A "Good Fellow's" Wife
o A Day's Pleasure
o God's Ravens
o Mrs. Ripley's Trip
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
o The Yellow Wall-Paper
o Turned
M. R. James (1862-1936)
o "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You,
My Lad"
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
o Roman Fever
o Souls Belated
o The Other Two
O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862-
1910)
o The Whirligig of Life
o The Cop and the Anthem
o The Gift of the Magi
o A Municipal Report
o The Caballero's Way
o Buried Treasure
o The Ransom of Red Chief
Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944)
o Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper
W. W. Jacobs (1863-1943)
o The Money-Box
o Jerry Bundler
o The Changeling
o Angels' Visits
o In the Family
o Low Water
o A Circular Tour
o The Rival Beauties
o The Monkey's Paw
Andrew Barton Banjo' Paterson (1864-1941)
o Three Elephant Power
o His Masterpiece
o White-when-he's-wanted
Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916)
o How Hefty Burke Got Even
o The Nature Faker
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) Awarded Nobel
o Without Benefit of Clergy


o The Mark of the Beast
o The Phantom 'Rickshaw
o 'They'
o The Man Who Would Be King
o The Strange Ride of Morrowbie
Jukes
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
o The Jilting of Jane
o The Magic Shop
o The Country of the Blind
o The Door in the Wall
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) Awarded Nobel
o War Good Choice!!!!!
Henry Lawson (1867-1922)
o The Drover's Wife
o The Golden Graveyard
o The Hairy Man
o The Shanty-Keepers Wife
o In a Wet Season
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)
o Twenty-Six Men and a Girl
Saki [Hector H. Munro] (1870-1916)
o The Lumber-Room
o Gabriel-Ernest
o Tobermory
o The Open Window
o The Cobweb
o The Story-Teller
Henry Handel Richardson [Ethel Florence
Lindesay Richardson] (1870-1946)
o Two Hanged Women
Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) Awarded Nobel Prize
in Literature 1933
o The Gentleman from San Francisco
Frank Norris (1870-1902)
o Fantaisie Printaniere
o The Ship That Saw a Ghost
o The Dual Personality of Slick Dick
Nickerson
o Two Hearts That Beat As One
o A Deal in Wheat
o A Case for Lombroso Good
Choice!!!!!
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
o An Experiment in Misery Good
Choice!!!!!
o The Open Boat
o The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
o The Blue Hotel
o The Little Regiment
o The Price of the Harness
o A Detail
o A Mystery of Heroism
o A Gray Sleeve
o The Pace Of Youth
o Three Miraculous Soldiers
o One Dash-Horses
o The Mesmeric Mountain
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
o Old Rogaum and His Theresa
o Married
o The Lost Phoebe
o Ida Hauchawout Good Choice!!!!!
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
o The Lynching of Jube Benson
Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945)
o The Shadowy Third
o The Past
Willa Cather (1873-1947)
o Jack-a-Boy
o The Burgler's Christmas
o Paul's Case
o On the Divide
o Lou, the Prophet
o The Enchanted Bluff
o The Affair at Grover Station
o Neighbour Rosicky
o The Bohemian Girl
o On the Gull's Road
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
o The Blue Cross
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
o In a Strange Land
o Mackintosh
o The Lotus Eater
o Rain
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
o The Good Anna
o Melanctha
Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950)
o The Treasure Ship
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) Awarded Nobel
o Tonio Kroger
o The Infant Prodigy
o Disorder and Early Sorrow
o Death in Venice
Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)
o Sister Josepha
Susan Glaspell (1876-1948)
o A Jury of Her Peers
Jack London (1876-1916)
o The Mexican
o The Heathen
o The Seed of McCoy
o South of the Slot


o To Build a Fire
o The Law of Life
o In a Far Country
o All Gold Canyon
o The White Silence
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
o I'm a Fool
o Seeds
o The Other Woman
o Unlighted Lamps
o The Door of the Trap
o Brothers
o War
o Motherhood
o Senility
o The Man in the Brown Coat
o The Philosopher
o The Egg
o I Want to Know Why
o The New Englander
o Hands
o Mother
o Adventure
William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918)
o The Voice in the Night
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) Awarded Nobel
o Within and Without
o In the Old "Sun"
A.E. Coppard (1878-1957)
o Broadsheet Ballad Good Choice!!!!!
o The Higgler
o Arabesque: The Mouse
o The Hurly-Burly
E.M. Forster (1879-1970)
o The Road from Colonus
o Mr. and Mrs. Abbeys Difficulties
o Mr. Andrews
o The Eternal Moment
o The Story of the Siren
James Branch Cabell (1879-1958)
o Porcelain Cups
Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958)
o A Drop in the Bucket
o The Artist
Horacio Quiroga (1879-1937)
o The Feather Pillow
Damon Runyon (1880-1946)
o The Bloodhounds of Broadway
o Blood Pressure
o A Piece of Pie Good
Choice!!!!!
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956)
o The Sick Gentleman's Last Visit
P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)
o Uncle Fred Flits By
James Joyce (1882-1941)
o Araby
o The Sisters
o Eveline
o A Little Cloud
o Counterparts
o Clay
o The Dead
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
o Kew Gardens
o The Duchess and the Jeweller
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
o The Metamorphosis
o A Hunger Artist
Isak Dinesen [Baroness Karen Blixen] (1885-
1962)
o Dreaming Child
o The Ring
o The Pearls
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) Awarded Nobel
o Moths in the Arc Light
o Go East, Young Man
o Let's Play King
o The Hack Driver
o The Willow Walk
o The Cat of Stars
o The Kidnaped Memorial
o Things
o Land
o Speed
o A Letter From the Queen
o The Ghost Patrol
o Young Man Axelbrod
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
o The Man Who Loved Islands
o Two Bluebirds
o Love Among the Haystacks
o The Horse Dealer's Daughter
o The Thorn in the Flesh
o The Shades of Spring
o The Christening
o Odour of Chrysanthemums
o The White Stocking
o The Prussian Officer
o Daughters of the Vicar
o Adolf
o Monkey Nuts
o Rex
o The Rocking-Horse Winner
Ring Lardner (1885-1933)


o I Can't Breathe
o My Roomy
o Alibi Ike
o Haircut
o Carmen
o The Golden Honeymoon
o Horseshoes
o The Water Cure
Franois Mauriac (1885-1970) Awarded
Nobel Prize in Literature 1952
o Thrse and the Doctor
Edna Ferber (1887-1968)
o April 25th, As Usual
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
o Killer in the Rain
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
o The Stranger
o Miss Brill
o The Garden-Party
o The Doll's House
o The Fly
Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)
o Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
o The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
o He
o The Old Order
o Flowering Judas
o Theft
o Rope
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
o Sweat
o The Gilded Six-Bits
o Story in Harlem Slang
o Spunk
o Black Death
Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
o Sanctuary
Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927)
o In a Grove
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
o Leaf by Niggle
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978)
o The Phoenix Good
Choice!!!!!
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
o You Were Perfectly Fine
o A Telephone Call
o Big Blonde
o Travelogue
o The Last Tea
o Arrangement in Black and White

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
o Blood-Burning Moon
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)
o Nightmare Town
o Ruffian's Wife
o The Man Who Killed Dan Odams
o Night Shots
o The Assistant Murderer
o Death on Pine Street
o The Second-Story Angel
o Afraid of a Gun
o One Hour
o Who Killed Bob Teal?
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
o The Gioconda Smile
o The Tillotson Banquet
o Nuns at Luncheon Good Choice!!!!!
James Thurber (1894-1961)
o The Catbird Seat
o The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Liam O'Flaherty (1896-1984)
o The Sniper
o The Inquisition
o The Reaping Race
o The Challenge
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
o The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button
o The Offshore Pirate
o The Jelly-bean
o The Baby Party
o The Rich Boy
o Babylon Revisited
o Winter Dreams
o A Short Trip Home
o An Alcoholic Case
o Crazy Sunday
o The Rough Crossing
o Design in Plaster
o Two for a Cent
o A Man in the Way
William Faulkner (1897-1962) Awarded Nobel
o A Rose for Emily
o Lucas Beauchamp
o Barn Burning
o That Evening Sun Go Down
o Wash
o Dry September
Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
o The Devil and Daniel Webster
o By the Waters of Babylon
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)


o The Man on the Threshold
o Death and the Compass
o The Garden of Forking Paths
Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) Awarded
o The Jay
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)
o The Easter Egg Party
o The Demon Lover
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
o First Love
o "That in Aleppo Once . . ."
o Sounds
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Awarded
o The Gambler, the Nun, and the
Radio
o The End of Something
o My Old Man
o A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
o A Very Short Story
o The Snows of Kilimanjaro
o The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber
o Hills Like White Elephants
o Big Two-Hearted River: Part I
o Big Two-Hearted River: Part II
o Cat in the Rain
o The Killers
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
o The Lost Boy
o His Fathers Earth
o Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

Sean O'Faolain (1900-1991)
o Fugue
V. S. Pritchett (1900-1997)
o The Saint
o Blind Love
Katherine Brush (1902-1952)
o Night Club
Kay Boyle (1902-1992)
o Convalescence
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
o Thank You, Ma'm
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) Awarded Nobel
o The Chrysanthemums
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
o Love Among the Ruins
Frank O'Connor (1903-1966)
o First Confession
o The Drunkard
o My Oedipus Complex
Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987)
o The People vs. Abe Lathan, Colored

o Yellow Girl
o The Strawberry Season
o Kneel to the Rising Sun
o Saturday Afternoon
Graham Greene (1904-1991)
o The Destructors
o The Hint of an Explanation
o I Spy
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) Awarded
o The Spinoza of Market Street
o The Washwoman
o Gimpel the Fool
Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
o Over the River and through the
Woods
o A Death in the House
Good Choice!!!!!
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) Awarded Nobel
o The Wall
Dorothy M. Johnson (1905-1984)
o A Man Called Horse
R. K. Narayan (1906-2001)
o An Astrologer's Day
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
o They
Louis LAmour (1908-1988)
o Trap of Gold
Eudora Welty (1909-2001)
o Why I Live at the P.O.
o Petrified Man
o A Curtain of Green
o The Hitch-Hikers
o A Worn Path
Paul Bowles (1910-1999)
o The Eye Good Choice!!!!!
Jack Finney (1911-1995)
o Contents of the Dead Man's Pockets
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
o The Yellow Bird
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) Awarded Nobel
o The Norwegian Rat
Tillie Olsen (1912-2007)
o I Stand Here Ironing
John Cheever (1912-1982)
o The Swimmer


o Clementina
o The Enormous Radio
o Goodbye, My Brother
o The Five-Forty-Eight
Albert Camus (1913-1960) Awarded Nobel
o The Guest
Julio Cortazar (1914-1984)
o Axolotl
o Blowup
o The Night Face Up
Octavio Paz (1914-1998) Awarded Nobel
o My Life with the Wave
o The Blue Bouquet
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)
o Battle Royal
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
o The Magic Barrel
o The Jewbird
Saul Bellow (1915-2005) Awarded Nobel
o A Silver Dish
o Leaving the Yellow House
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)
o The Lottery
o Charles
o One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts
Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
o Wunderkind
o The Sojourner
o A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.
o The Jockey
o A Domestic Dilemma
Peter Taylor (1917-1994)
o A Spinsters Tale
Es'Kia Mphahlele (1919-2008)
o Mrs. Plum
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
o The Evitable Conflict
Yuri Markovich Nagibin (1920-1994)
o My First and Most Beloved Friend
Good Choice!!!!!
Yoshiko Uchida (1921-1992)
o The Bracelet
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007)
o Harrison Bergeron
Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951)
o This Way for the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen
Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
o The Adventure of a Nearsighted
Man
o The Adventure of a Photographer
o The Adventure of a Poet
Truman Capote (1924-1984)
o A Christmas Memory
o Miriam
Abioseh Nicol (1924-1994)
o Life Is Sweet at Kumansenu
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
o Everything That Rises Must
Converge
o Good Country People
o The Artificial Nigger
o A Circle of Fire
o The Life You Save May Be Your
Own
o Parker's Back
o Revelation
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970)
o Fountains in the Rain
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)
o The King of the Elves
John Updike (1932-2009)
o Pigeon Feathers Good
Choice!!!!!
o A & P
Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)
o The Lesson

ACC - The Short Story - Literary Analysis and Composition

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

ACC - The Short Story - Literary Analysis and Composition

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

English 1302

Literary Analysis and

You might also like