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Perrine’s Literature

Liberty University Online English 102

Custom Edition

Greg Johnson | Thomas R. Arp

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Perrine’s Literature: Liberty University Online English 102, Custom Edition

Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 13th Edition Greg Johnson | Thomas R. Arp

© 2018 Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

Compilation © 2018 Cengage Learning, Inc.

9781337900188

Introduction to Liberty University Online ENGL 102

Welcome to ENGL 102 – Composition and Literature. You may think that this course is

just another survey of literature, but it is much more. English 102 will help you become more

precise as you read and sharpen your critical thinking and writing skills, all through a biblical

worldview. You will not simply read a few short stories, some poems, and a play; you will enrich

your understanding of other people, expressing yourself, and making connections between your

experiences and God’s truth in the Bible. These skills are invaluable in every part of your life.

In addition, this course will indirectly enhance your ability to study the Bible. God’s

Word is filled with narrative (stories), poetry, proverbs, and dramatic historical accounts. In

other words, the Bible has many literary qualities. Of course, the Bible is much more than

literature; it is God’s truth for humanity. Yet, God uses stories, poetry, and other genres to help

people understand His truth. Thus, as you become more skillful in reading and analyzing literary

works, you will also become more skillful in understanding the Bible and God.

Every course at Liberty University is designed to help make all of us “Champions for

Christ.” Our goal is to become heroic leaders who serve God and serve others with the love and

wisdom that only God can give us. To become what God has called us to be, we do need the kind

of skills this course can teach and improve. Thus, English 102 offers an opportunity to

1. improve your ability to fairly and carefully analyze written works,

2. use research and logic to clearly communicate with others, and

3. grow in your empathy for the feelings and needs of others.

As you work on the assignments, make personal growth your high priority. Rather than merely

taking a course, view yourself as a servant of God who is developing your skills for the future.

Regardless of career path, we are all called to be known for our love for others, and we can

demonstrate this love through writing, understanding, and insights.

Overview of Online ENGL 102: Composition and Literature

This course consists of eight weekly modules with the following titles:

1. The Christian Worldview

2. Introduction to Fiction

3. Fiction Unit

4. Introduction to Poetry

5. Poetry Unit

6. Introduction to Drama

7. Drama Unit

8. Conclusion

To understand the expectations of this course, study the syllabus, course schedule, assignment

instructions, and grading rubrics. Throughout, you will often want to go back and review these

documents for guidance.

Overview of Weekly Modules and Assignments

“The Christian Worldview” for Week/Module 1 introduces the course and focuses on the

importance of studying literature. It addresses such concerns as: “What is literature?” “Why

study literature?” and “Should Christians study non-Christian literature?” It also explains how

Christians can take a holistic approach to literature. In a Discussion Board assignment, you will

post your thoughts and respond to the posts of one or more other students. This assignment is due

at the end of week 1.

“Introduction to Fiction” and “Fiction Unit” will be studied in Modules/Weeks 2 and 3.

You will briefly look at the development of the short story as well as consider the essential

features of most narrative works. These features can be understood with terms such as:

1. theme

2. verisimilitude

3. plot and structure

4. conflict and resolution

5. setting

6. stock, flat, dynamic, and round characters

7. motivation

8. point of view

9. various types of irony

10. symbol, allegory, and humor.

You will want to apply such terms to these works:

• “The Prodigal Son” by St. Luke

• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

• “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D. H. Lawrence

• “The Destructors” by Graham Greene

• “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In this unit, we will

1. take a pre-test and a test on fiction

2. develop a thesis and outline and

3. write a comparison essay based on any two of the short stories studied.

A chapter on writing about literature will guide you through the whole writing process. The

essay is due by the end of Week 3 and requires no secondary sources. If you do use sources, be

sure to acknowledge them with proper citations to avoid plagiarism. Students may use MLA,

APA, or Turabian documentation format. Rough drafts can be submitted to the Online Writing

Center (OWC) and Tutoring Service (OTS) for review. Online appointments for one-on-one

tutoring are also available. This free assistance can coach you in the areas of content,

organization, grammar, and documentation. Using this service is strongly recommended for your

success but not required.

“Introduction to Poetry” and “Poetry Unit” will be studied in Modules/Weeks 4 and 5.

Week 4 begins with a definition of poetry, introduction to the elements of poetry, and a

discussion of selected poems to illustrate what is studied. Some of the topics are

1. theme

2. speaker or persona

3. denotation and connotation

4. imagery

5. closed form and sonnets

6. figures of speech, metaphor/simile, personification, apostrophe, metonymy,

symbol, and allegory

7. paradox, overstatement, and understatement

8. allusion

9. tone

10. musical devices, rhyme, rhythm, meter, and alliteration

11. pattern

Selected brief poems of less than a page are used to illustrate these devices. Module/Week 5

continues the poetry unit with a discussion of the principles of poetic analysis.

Though several poems are discussed in this unit’s lectures on poetry, only the following brief

poems are required to be read and studied carefully:

• “The Lamb,” “The Tiger,” and “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake

• “Batter my heart, three-personed God” and “Death Be Not Proud” by John

Donne

• “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot

• “God’s Grandeur” and “Spring” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

• “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats

• “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

• “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning

• “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats

• “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by

Robert Frost

• “It Sifts from Leaden Sieves” and “There’s No Frigate Like a Book” by Emily

Dickinson

• “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

• Psalms 1 & 23

• “Virtue” by George Herbert, and

• “That Time of Year” (Sonnet 73) by William Shakespeare.

In addition, we will

1. take a pre-test and a test on poetry

2. follow the writing process to produce a thesis/outline, and

3. write a literary analysis essay based on one of the poems studied.

The task of the essay is two-fold: to discuss the theme of the poem and the major devices the

poet uses to communicate it. The essay is due by the end of Week 5. Its focus should

be analysis of the primary text (poem) only. If secondary sources are used, they must be fully

acknowledged to avoid plagiarism. As in the earlier essay, formatting and documentation can

follow MLA, APA, or Turabian styles. Again, using the Online Writing Center and Tutoring

Service is strongly recommended but not required.

Module/Week 6 begins the study of drama with a definition of drama and introduction to

the elements of drama. Topics in this unit include the unities of time, place, and action; Freytag

Pyramid, rising action, falling action, catastrophe, denouement, and others. This module also

provides an overview of three plays, Oedipus by Sophocles, Othello, The Moor of Venice by

William Shakespeare, and the medieval morality play Everyman, to illustrate the principles

studied. Though these three plays are discussed in the lectures, you should pick only one play

and study it carefully. Before choosing which play to read, it would be helpful to read the

Research Paper Instructions. An awareness of the writing prompts, before choosing the play to

focus on, will help you concentrate on specific elements of the play while you read it. This will

make the whole research project much easier.

A thesis, outline, draft, and bibliography are due at the beginning of Module/Week 7. The

instructor will provide feedback before the final draft is written and submitted at the beginning of

Module/Week 8. The Research Paper is the singularly most weighted assignment in this course,

so be attentive to the instructions and use the multiple aids that will help ensure success,

especially the Online Writing Center and the Appendix on Documentation, which provides

examples of how to correctly cite some of the assigned readings.

Tests: Each test has 50 questions (multiple-choice and true or false) that should be

completed in 90 minutes. The questions are derived from the lesson outlines, lecture

presentations, definitions of literary terms, titles of stories, poems, plays, authors, major

characters, salient quotes from the readings, and assigned reading. The pre-tests, which can be

taken multiple times, are each worth 20 points. The pre-tests give an idea of what to expect on

each test. The tests are “open book.” This means that you can refer to your textbooks and

notes during the test, but do not forget the 90-minute time limit; if you exceed it, you can still

finish the test, but your instructor will be alerted that extra time was taken.

Test 1 covers Modules 1, 2, and 3 on Fiction.

Test 2 covers Modules 4 and 5 on Poetry.

Test 3 covers Modules 6 and 7 on Drama.

Essays: The essays carry the most points and, therefore, deserve more time and energy.

In fact, it is wise to start early and allow abundant time for careful thought and revision because

the writing process is multifaceted. It includes:

1. thoroughly and carefully reading the assigned texts

2. taking notes

3. discovering the literary devices used by the authors

4. organizing a clear and logical response to the texts

5. gathering textual evidence for claims

6. using a sense of audience to develop a precise introduction, a unified body

with necessary transitions, and impressive conclusion

7. proper documentation

8. repeated revision of words, sentences, transitions, and point.

In sum, this English 102 course focuses on the analysis of three genres of literature: short

fiction, poetry, and drama. It is intended to improve reading, critical thinking, and writing skills

through interpretation of literature from a Christian world view perspective.

B R I E F C O N T E N T S

Writing about Literature 1

FICTION

The Elements of Fiction 55 Chapter One Reading the Story 56 Chapter Two Plot and Structure 97 Chapter Three Characterization 142 Chapter Four Theme 192 Chapter Five Point of View 240 Chapter Six Symbol, Allegory, and Fantasy 286 Chapter Seven Humor and Irony 330 Chapter Eight Evaluating Fiction 365 Three Featured Writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor,

Joyce  Carol Oates 389

Stories for Further Reading 549

POETRY

The Elements of Poetry 705 Chapter One What Is Poetry? 706 Chapter Two Reading the Poem 725 Chapter Three Denotation and Connotation 743 Chapter Four Imagery 759 Chapter Five Figurative Language 1: Simile, Metaphor, Personification,

Apostrophe, Metonymy 773 Chapter Six Figurative Language 2: Symbol, Allegory 792

v

vi BRIEF CONTENTS

Chapter Seven Figurative Language 3: Paradox, Overstatement, Understatement, Irony 814

Chapter Eight Allusion 834 Chapter Nine Meaning and Idea 850 Chapter Ten Tone 863 Chapter Eleven Musical Devices 883 Chapter Twelve Rhythm and Meter 900 Chapter Thirteen Sound and Meaning 926 Chapter Fourteen Pattern 945 Chapter Fifteen Evaluating Poetry 1: Sentimental, Rhetorical,

Didactic Verse 963 Chapter Sixteen Evaluating Poetry 2: Poetic Excellence 975

Poems for Further Reading 1009

DRAMA

The Elements of Drama 1075 Chapter One The Nature of Drama 1076 Chapter Two Realistic and Nonrealistic Drama 1123 Chapter Three Tragedy and Comedy 1250

Appendix A Appendix B

ENGL 102 Documentation Appendix A-1 Additional Readings A-29

C O N T E N T S

Preface xxvi

Professional Acknowledgments xxix

Foreword to Students xxxi

Writing about Literature 1 I. Why Write about Literature? 3

II. For Whom Do You Write? 3

III. Two Basic Approaches 5

1. Explication 5

2. Analysis 6

IV. Choosing a Topic 6

1. Essays That Focus on a Single Literary Work 7

2. Essays of Comparison and Contrast 7

3. Essays on a Number of Works by a Single Author 8

4. Essays on a Number of Works with Some Feature Other than Authorship in Common 9

V. Proving Your Point 10

VI. Writing the Essay 11

VII. Writing In-Class Essays or Essay Tests 14

VIII. Introducing Quotations 15

1. Principles and Guidelines 16

IX. Documentation 22

1. Textual Documentation (TD1–TD4) 23

2. Parenthetical Documentation (PD1–PD6) 24

3. Documentation by List of Works Cited 27

4. Documentation of Electronic Sources 28

X. Stance and Style (S1–S6) 30

vii

I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i b e r t y U n i v e r s i t y O n l i n e E N G L 1 0 2

XI. Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage: Common Problems 33

1. Grammar (G1–G2) 33

2. Punctuation (P1–P5) 34

3. Usage (U1–U2) 35

XII. Writing Samples 38

1. Fiction Explication: The Indeterminate Ending in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 38

2. Fiction Analysis: The Function of the Frame Story in “Once upon a Time” 41

3. Poetry Explication: “A Study of Reading Habits” 43

4. Poetry Analysis: Diction in “Spring in the Classroom” 46

5. Drama Explication: Iago’s First Soliloquy 48

6. Drama Analysis: Othello’s Race 52

FICTION

The Elements of Fiction 55 CHAPTER ONE Reading the Story 56

Reviewing Chapter One 62 Richard Connell The Most Dangerous Game 62 Tobias Wolff Hunters in the Snow 79 Suggestions for Writing 93 Understanding and Evaluating Fiction 94

CHAPTER TWO Plot and Structure 97

105

133

Reviewing Chapter Two 104 Graham Greene The Destructors Kazuo Ishiguro A Family Supper Suggestions for Writing 141

CHAPTER THREE Characterization 142

Reviewing Chapter Three 146 Alice Walker Everyday Use 147

viii CONTENTS

Katherine Mansfield Miss Brill 155 James Baldwin Sonny’s Blues 159 James Joyce Araby 186 Suggestions for Writing 191

CHAPTER FOUR Theme 192

Reviewing Chapter Four 198 F. Scott Fitzgerald Babylon Revisited 199 Anton Chekhov The Darling 216 Eudora Welty The Worn Path 227 Nadine Gordimer Once upon a Time 234 Suggestions for Writing 239

CHAPTER FIVE Point of View 240

Reviewing Chapter Five 246 Willa Cather Paul’s Case 247 Shirley Jackson The Lottery 264 Katherine Anne Porter The Jilting of Granny Weatherall 272 Ernest Hemingway Hills Like White Elephants 280 Suggestions for Writing 285

CHAPTER SIX Symbol, Allegory, and Fantasy 286

Reviewing Chapter Six 296 D. H. Lawrence The Rocking-Horse Winner 297 Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper 310 Ray Bradbury There Will Come Soft Rains 324 Suggestions for Writing 329

CHAPTER SEVEN Humor and Irony 330

Reviewing Chapter Seven 334 Daniel Orozco Orientation 334 Mark Twain Cannibalism in the Cars 339 Albert Camus The Guest 347 John Updike A & P 358 Suggestions for Writing 364

CONTENTS ix

CHAPTER EIGHT Evaluating Fiction 365

Reviewing Chapter Eight 368 Guy de Maupassant The Necklace 369 Edith Wharton Roman Fever 376 Suggestions for Writing 387

THREE FEATURED WRITERS: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,

FLANNERY O’CONNOR, JOYCE C AROL OATES 389

Introduction 391 Nathaniel Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown 392 The Minister’s Black Veil 404 The Birthmark 415

Flannery O’Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find 438 Good Country People 451 Revelation 468

Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 502 Life after High School 516 The Scarf 530

STORIES FOR FURTHER READING 549 Raymond Carver Neighbors 550 Kate Chopin The Story of an Hour 554 William Faulkner A Rose for Emily 557 Susan Glaspell A Jury of Her Peers 564 Zora Neale Hurston Sweat 583 Henry James The Real Thing 593 Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis 614 Jhumpa Lahiri Interpreter of Maladies 653 Ursula K. Le Guin The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas 670 Edgar Allan Poe The Fall of the House of Usher 675 Annie Proulx Job History 691 Ron Rash The Ascent 695

x CONTENTS

POETRY

The Elements of Poetry 705 CHAPTER ONE What Is Poetry? 706

Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Eagle 708 William Shakespeare Winter 709 Wilfred Owen Dulce et Decorum Est 710 Reviewing Chapter One 713 Understanding and Evaluating Poetry 714

William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 715 Sylvia Plath Black Rook in Rainy Weather 715 John Donne The Triple Fool 717 Gwendolyn Brooks The Bean Eaters 718 Louise Glück Labor Day 718 William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow 719 Elizabeth Bishop Filling Station 720 Langston Hughes Suicide’s Note 721 Edwin Arlington Robinson Richard Cory 721 Ben Jonson On My First Son 722 Billy Collins Introduction to Poetry 723 Suggestions for Writing 724

CHAPTER TWO Reading the Poem 725

Thomas Hardy The Man He Killed 727 Philip Larkin A Study of Reading Habits 728 A. E. Housman “Is my team plowing” 732 Reviewing Chapter Two 734

John Donne Break of Day 734 Emily Dickinson There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House 735 Ted Hughes Hawk Roosting 736 John Keats Ode on Melancholy 737 Robert Herrick Upon Julia’s Clothes 738 Sylvia Plath Mirror 739 Natasha Trethewey Collection Day 739 Walt Whitman The Dalliance of Eagles 740

CONTENTS xi

Adrienne Rich Storm Warnings 741 Suggestions for Writing 742

CHAPTER THREE Denotation and Connotation 743

Emily Dickinson There is no Frigate like a Book 744 William Shakespeare When my love swears that she is made of truth 745 Mary Oliver Spring in the Classroom 746 Exercises 748 Reviewing Chapter Three 749

Langston Hughes Cross 749 William Wordsworth The world is too much with us 750 Robert Frost Desert Places 750 Natasha Trethewey Accounting 751 Sharon Olds 35/10 752 J. D. McClatchy The Ledger 753 Julia Alvarez Dusting 753 Elizabeth Bishop In the Waiting Room 754 Wallace Stevens Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock 757 Suggestions for Writing 758

CHAPTER FOUR Imagery 759

Robert Browning Meeting at Night 760 Robert Browning Parting at Morning 761 Exercises 762 Reviewing Chapter Four 762

Gerard Manley Hopkins Spring 762 William Carlos Williams The Widow’s Lament in Springtime 763 Emily Dickinson I felt a Funeral, in my Brain 764 Adrienne Rich Living in Sin 765 Seamus Heaney The Forge 766 Robert Frost After Apple-Picking 767 Robert Hayden Those Winter Sundays 768 Walt Whitman I Saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing 769 Wallace Stevens The Snow Man 770 John Keats To Autumn 771 Suggestions for Writing 772

xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER FIVE Figurative Language 1: Simile, Metaphor, Personification,

Apostrophe, Metonymy 773

Langston Hughes Harlem 774 Emily Dickinson It sifts from Leaden Sieves 775 Anne Bradstreet The Author to Her Book 777 John Keats Bright Star 778 Exercise 781 Reviewing Chapter Five 782

Sylvia Plath Metaphors 782 Emily Dickinson I taste a liquor never brewed 783 Philip Larkin Toads 784 Ralph Waldo Emerson The Snowstorm 785 Rachel Hadas Ghost Yogurt 786 Billy Collins Divorce 787 John Donne A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 787 Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress 789 Suggestions for Writing 791

CHAPTER SIX Figurative Language 2: Symbol, Allegory 792

Robert Frost The Road Not Taken 792 Walt Whitman A Noiseless Patient Spider 794 William Blake The Sick Rose 796 Seamus Heaney Digging 797 Robert Herrick To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time 800 George Herbert Redemption 801 Exercises 802 Reviewing Chapter Six 803

Louise Glück Purple Bathing Suit 803 Clive James Whitman and the Moth 804 Archibald MacLeish You, Andrew Marvell 805 Robert Frost Fire and Ice 806 Emily Dickinson Because I could not stop for Death 807 John Donne Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness 808 Sylvia Plath Spinster 810 Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ulysses 811 Suggestions for Writing 813

CONTENTS xiii

CHAPTER SEVEN Figurative Language 3: Paradox, Overstatement,

Understatement, Irony 814

Emily Dickinson Much Madness is divinest Sense 815 John Donne The Sun Rising 816 Marge Piercy Barbie Doll 819 William Blake The Chimney Sweeper 820 Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias 822 Exercise 823 Reviewing Chapter Seven 823

William Wordsworth A slumber did my spirit seal 824 John Donne Batter my heart, three-personed God 824 Seamus Heaney Mid-Term Break 825 W. H. Auden The Unknown Citizen 826 Lucille Clifton in the inner city 827 Emily Dickinson What Soft—Cherubic Creatures 828 Theodore Roethke My Papa’s Waltz 828 Sylvia Plath The Colossus 829 Robert Browning Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 830 Suggestions for Writing 833

CHAPTER EIGHT Allusion 834

Robert Frost “Out, Out—” 835 William Shakespeare from Macbeth (“She should have died

hereafter”) 836 Sylvia Plath Wuthering Heights 838 Reviewing Chapter Eight 839

Louise Glück Eurydice 839 e. e. cummings in Just— 840 John Milton On His Blindness 841 Edwin Arlington Robinson Miniver Cheevy 842 Sharon Olds My Son the Man 843 T. S. Eliot Journey of the Magi 844 Billy Collins Genesis 846 William Butler Yeats Leda and the Swan 847 Emily Dickinson A little East of Jordan 848 Suggestions for Writing 849

xiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER NINE Meaning and Idea 850

A. E. Housman Loveliest of Trees 851 Robert Frost Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 852 Reviewing Chapter Nine 854

Emily Dickinson Four Trees—upon a solitary Acre 854 Robert Frost Design 855 e. e. cummings O sweet spontaneous 856 Walt Whitman When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer 857 John Keats On the Sonnet 857 Billy Collins Sonnet 858 Natasha Trethewey Southern History 859 Carolyn Forché The Colonel 860 William Blake The Lamb 861 William Blake The Tiger 861 Suggestions for Writing 862

CHAPTER TEN Tone 863

Denise Levertov To the Snake 865 Emily Dickinson A narrow Fellow in the Grass 865 Michael Drayton Since there’s no help 867 Louise Glück Lost Love 868 Reviewing Chapter Ten 869

William Shakespeare My mistress’ eyes 870 Alfred, Lord Tennyson Crossing the Bar 870 Thomas Hardy The Oxen 871 John Donne The Flea 872 Sharon Olds Bop After Hip Op 873 William Butler Yeats Among School Children 874 Natasha Trethewey History Lesson 877 Matthew Arnold Dover Beach 877 Philip Larkin Church Going 879 Alexander Pope Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His

Royal Highness 881 Suggestions for Writing 882

CONTENTS xv

CHAPTER ELEVEN Musical Devices 883

W. H. Auden That night when joy began 885 Theodore Roethke The Waking 886 Gerard Manley Hopkins God’s Grandeur 888 Reviewing Chapter Eleven 889

William Shakespeare Blow, blow, thou winter wind 890 Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool 890 Edna St. Vincent Millay Counting-Out Rhyme 891 Edgar Allan Poe The Bells 892 Sylvia Plath Morning Song 895 Sharon Olds Rite of Passage 896 Mary Oliver Music Lessons 897 William Stafford Traveling through the dark 898 Robert Frost Nothing Gold Can Stay 899 Suggestions for Writing 899

CHAPTER TWELVE Rhythm and Meter 900

George Herbert Virtue 905 Exercises 914 Reviewing Chapter Twelve 915

William Blake “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence 915 Walt Whitman Had I the Choice 916 George Gordon, Lord Byron Stanzas 917 Elizabeth Bishop Insomnia 917 Sylvia Plath Old Ladies’ Home 918 Linda Pastan To a Daughter Leaving Home 919 Robert Browning Porphyria’s Lover 920 Alfred, Lord Tennyson Break, break, break 922 Edgar Allan Poe Annabel Lee 923 Suggestions for Writing 924

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Sound and Meaning 926

Anonymous Pease Porridge Hot 926 A. E. Housman Eight O’Clock 928

xvi CONTENTS

Alexander Pope Sound and Sense 929 Emily Dickinson I heard a Fly buzz—when I died 933 Exercise 935 Reviewing Chapter Thirteen 937

Wilfred Owen Anthem for Doomed Youth 937 Sylvia Plath Suicide off Egg Rock 938 Pattiann Rogers Night and the Creation of Geography 939 Adrienne Rich Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers 940 Galway Kinnell Blackberry Eating 940 Seamus Heaney The Skunk 941 Dylan Thomas Fern Hill 942 William Carlos Williams The Dance 944 Suggestions for Writing 944

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Pattern 945

George Herbert The Pulley 946 John Keats On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer 948 William Shakespeare That time of year 949 Dylan Thomas Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night 950 Exercises 952 Reviewing Chapter Fourteen 952

Elizabeth Bishop One Art 953 Sylvia Plath Mad Girl’s Love Song 954 William Shakespeare from Romeo and Juliet 955 John Donne Death, be not proud 955 William Butler Yeats The Folly of Being Comforted 956 Claude McKay The White City 957 Billy Collins Villanelle 957 Paul Laurence Dunbar We Wear the Mask 958 Robert Frost Acquainted with the Night 959 Seamus Heaney Villanelle for an Anniversary 960 Robert Herrick Delight in Disorder 961 Suggestions for Writing 962

CONTENTS xvii

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Evaluating Poetry 1: Sentimental, Rhetorical,

Didactic Verse 963

Reviewing Chapter Fifteen 966

God’s Will for You and Me 966 Pied Beauty 967

Pitcher 967 The Old-Fashioned Pitcher 967

A Poison Tree 968 The Most Vital Thing in Life 968

Lower New York: At Dawn 969 Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 970

Piano 970 The Days Gone By 971

I would not paint—a picture 971 If I can stop one Heart from breaking 972

When I have fears that I may cease to be 973 O Solitude! 973

Suggestions for Writing 974

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Evaluating Poetry 2: Poetic Excellence 975

John Donne The Canonization 976 Percy Bysshe Shelley Ode to the West Wind 978 John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn 981 Robert Browning My Last Duchess 983 Emily Dickinson There’s a certain Slant of light 985 Robert Frost Home Burial 986 T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 990 William Butler Yeats Sailing to Byzantium 995 Wallace Stevens Sunday Morning 996 Langston Hughes The Weary Blues 1000 Elizabeth Bishop The Fish 1002 Sylvia Plath Lady Lazarus 1004

xviii CONTENTS

FEATURED POETS The following poems appear as illustrations in various chapters of the

book, but these five poets are represented by a sufficient number of poems to warrant studying them as individual artists. Approaches to analysis and writing are suggested on pages 5–9 of this book.

Emily Dickinson A little East of Jordan 848 A narrow Fellow in the Grass 865 Because I could not stop for Death 807 Four Trees—upon a solitary Acre 854 I died for Beauty—but was scarce 1021 I felt a Funeral, in my brain 764 I heard a Fly buzz—when I died 933 I taste a liquor never brewed 783 I would not paint—a picture 971 If I can stop one Heart from breaking 972 It sifts from Leaden Sieves 775 Much Madness is divinest Sense 815 There is no Frigate like a Book 744 There’s a certain Slant of light 985 There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House 735 What Soft—Cherubic Creatures 828

John Donne A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 787 Batter my heart, three-personed God 824 Break of Day 734 Death, be not proud 955 Hymn to God My God, in my Sickness 808 Song: Go and catch a falling star 1021 The Apparition 1022 The Canonization 976 The Flea 872 The Good-Morrow 1023 The Sun Rising 816 The Triple Fool 717

Robert Frost Acquainted with the Night 959 After Apple-Picking 767 Birches 1025 Desert Places 750

CONTENTS xix

Design 855 Fire and Ice 806 Home Burial 986 Mending Wall 1027 Nothing Gold Can Stay 899 “Out, Out—” 835 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 852 The Road Not Taken 792

John Keats Bright Star 778 La Belle Dame sans Merci 1042 O Solitude! 973 Ode on a Grecian Urn 981 Ode on Melancholy 737 Ode to a Nightingale 1044 On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer 948 On the Sonnet 857 This living hand 1046 To Autumn 771 To Sleep 1046 When I have fears that I may cease to be 973

Sylvia Plath Black Rook in Rainy Weather 715 Lady Lazarus 1004 Mad Girl’s Love Song 954 Metaphors 782 Mirror 739 Morning Song 895 Old Ladies’ Home 918 Spinster 810 Suicide off Egg Rock 938 The Colossus 829 Wuthering Heights 838

xx CONTENTS

A CONTEMPORARY COLLECTION These five contemporary poets are represented by six poems each,

included at various points in the book. They offer students the opportunity to sample at greater lengths the works of poets of their own time.

Billy Collins Divorce 787 Genesis 846 Introduction to Poetry 723 The Dead 1018 Villanelle 957 Weighing the Dog 1018

Louise Glück Cousins 1028 Eurydice 839 Labor Day 718 Lost Love 868 Primavera 1029 Purple Bathing Suit 803

Seamus Heaney Digging 797 Follower 1034 Mid-Term Break 825 The Forge 766 The Skunk 941 Villanelle for an Anniversary 960

Sharon Olds Bop After Hip Op 873 I Go Back to May 1937 1056 My Son the Man 843 Rite of Passage 896 The Connoisseuse of Slugs 1056 35/10 752

Natasha Trethewey Accounting 751 Blond 1065 Collection Day 739 History Lesson 877 Miscegenation 1066 Southern History 859

CONTENTS xxi

Poems for Further Reading Kim Addonizio Sonnenizio on a Line from Drayton 1010 W. H. Auden Musée des Beaux Arts 1010 Aphra Behn On Her Loving Two Equally 1011 Elizabeth Bishop Manners 1011 William Blake The Garden of Love 1013 Gwendolyn Brooks a song in the front yard 1013 Gwendolyn Brooks Sadie and Maud 1014 George Gordon, Lord Byron She Walks in Beauty 1014 Amy Clampitt Witness 1015 Lucille Clifton good times 1016 Henri Cole Mask 1016 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan 1017 Billy Collins The Dead 1018 Billy Collins Weighing the Dog 1018 Stephen Crane War Is Kind 1019 e. e. cummings Buffalo Bill’s defunct 1020 e. e. cummings the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls 1020 Emily Dickinson I died for Beauty—but was scarce 1021 John Donne Song: Go and catch a falling star 1021 John Donne The Apparition 1022 John Donne The Good-Morrow 1023 Mark Doty Pescadero 1023 Paul Laurence Dunbar Sympathy 1024 Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson I Sit and Sew 1025 Robert Frost Birches 1025 Robert Frost Mending Wall 1027 Louise Glück Cousins 1028 Louise Glück Primavera 1029 Thomas Hardy “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” 1029 Thomas Hardy Channel Firing 1030 Thomas Hardy Hap 1032 Thomas Hardy The Darkling Thrush 1032 Thomas Hardy The Ruined Maid 1033 Seamus Heaney Follower 1034 George Herbert Love 1035 George Herbert Peace 1035 A. E. Housman “Terence, this is stupid stuff” 1037 A. E. Housman To an Athlete Dying Young 1039

xxii CONTENTS

Langston Hughes Theme for English B 1040 Randall Jarrell The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner 1041 Ben Jonson Still to be Neat 1041 Ben Jonson To Celia 1042 John Keats La Belle Dame sans Merci 1042 John Keats Ode to a Nightingale 1044 John Keats This living hand 1046 John Keats To Sleep 1046 Galway Kinnell After Making Love We Hear Footsteps 1047 Archibald MacLeish Ars Poetica 1047 Christopher Marlowe The Passionate Shepherd to His Love 1048 Cleopatra Mathis Survival: A Guide 1049 Judson Mitcham Story 1050 Judson Mitcham Stroke 1050 Meghan O’Rourke Apartment Living 1051 Joyce Carol Oates Bloodline, Elegy: Su Qijian Family, Beijing 1051 Joyce Carol Oates Playlet for Voices 1054 Sharon Olds I Go Back to May 1937 1056 Sharon Olds The Connoisseuse of Slugs 1056 Katha Pollitt Moth 1057 Alexander Pope Ode on Solitude 1058 Edwin Arlington Robinson Eros Turannos 1059 Edwin Arlington Robinson Mr. Flood’s Party 1060 Christina Rossetti Song 1062 Christina Rossetti Up-Hill 1062 William Shakespeare Let me not to the marriage of true minds 1063 Edmund Spenser One day I wrote her name upon the strand 1063 Wallace Stevens Anecdote of the Jar 1064 Jonathan Swift A Description of the Morning 1064 Natasha Trethewey Blond 1065 Natasha Trethewey Miscegenation 1066 Walt Whitman A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim 1066 Walt Whitman Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted 1067 William Wordsworth I wandered lonely as a cloud 1068 William Wordsworth My heart leaps up when I behold 1069 William Wordsworth The Solitary reaper 1069 Thomas Wyatt My galley chargèd with forgetfulness 1070 William Butler Yeats The Lake Isle of Innisfree 1070 William Butler Yeats The Second Coming 1071 William Butler Yeats The Song of Wandering Aengus 1072 William Butler Yeats The Wild Swans at Coole 1072

CONTENTS xxiii

DR AMA

The Elements of Drama 1075 CHAPTER ONE The Nature of Drama 1076

1080 Reviewing Chapter One 1079 Understanding and Evaluating Drama

1091Susan Glaspell Trifles

CHAPTER TWO Realistic and Nonrealistic Drama 1123

Reviewing Chapter Two 1127 Henrik Ibsen A Doll House 1128 Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie 1188

CHAPTER THREE Tragedy and Comedy 1250

Reviewing Chapter Three 1257 Sophocles Oedipus Rex 1257

1303William Shakespeare Othello, the Moor of Venice

xxiv CONTENTS

CONTENTS xxv

Glossary of Terms 1633

Copyrights and Acknowledgments 1647

Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines 1663

Appendix A: ENGL 102 Documentation Appendix A-1

Appendix B: Additional Readings A-29

Emily Dickinson It sifts from Leaden Sieves A-30 Gerard Manley Hopkins Spring A-32 John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn A-33 The Parable of the Lost Son A-36 Psalm 1 A-38 Psalm 23 A-39

P R E FAC E

In preparing this thirteenth edition of Perrines’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, I have striven to be faithful to the principles established by Laurence Perrine more than sixty years ago while also acknowledg- ing the evolving nature of literature. Not only have I been guided by my own experience but also by the rich legacy of Thomas R. Arp, who joined Perrine in 1979, and by the helpful suggestions of many teachers who have contributed the results of their classroom experience. Many of them are identified in the “Professional Acknowledgments” pages. Their insights have been invaluable in helping me replace more than 25 percent of the literature printed in the previous edition.

Here I must expand briefly on the contribution of Thomas R. Arp, who passed away in 2015 but whose work on Literature for more than thirty-five years has left an indelible imprint. Professor Arp’s depth of knowledge and experience with the book as a whole, combined with his perspicacity in choosing stories to illustrate the principles of each chapter, has been a source of inspiration to me during the many years I worked with him, and here I wish to salute his achievement. Although any faults in this new edition are mine alone, I continued to benefit from his wisdom and insight in his last years, since he graciously consented to serve in a consult- ing role as we revised the book. Thus his name, I’m happy to say, continues to grace the cover of the book, a fitting reminder of his past contributions.

In keeping with Perrine’s and Arp’s shared principles, the book works to balance the classic with the contemporary, to represent a wide diversity of writers, and to emphasize the importance of understanding the elements of literature as the avenue to enjoy and appreciate it. Although there are many flourishing approaches to literature and its effects, all three of us have always believed that the initial step must be understanding the major ele- ments of fiction, poetry, and drama.

This book is written for the student who is beginning a serious study of literature. It seeks to give that student a sufficient grasp of the nature and variety of fiction, poetry, and drama; some reasonable means for read- ing with appreciative understanding; and a few primary ideas on how to evaluate literature. The separate chapters gradually introduce the student to the elements of literature, putting the emphasis always on how and why: How can the reader use these elements to get at the meaning of the work, to

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PREFACE xxvii

interpret it correctly, and to respond to it adequately. Why does the writer use these elements? What values have they for the writer and the reader?

In matters of theory, some issues are undoubtedly simplified, but I hope none seriously, and some more sophisticated theoretical approaches have had to be excluded. The purpose has always been to give the begin- ning student something to understand and use. The first assumption of Literature is that literature needs to be read carefully and considered thoughtfully, and that, when so read, it gives readers continuing rewards in experience and understanding. I also assume that some works repay more richly than others the trouble and effort expended in reading them, and my objective is to help the student identify, understand, enjoy, and prefer such works. To this end, the book examines the major elements of literature and suggests some criteria for judgment.

The organization and structure of the book reinforce the step-by-step approach to understanding literature. Each chapter contains two parts: (1) a discussion of the topic indicated by the chapter title, with illustrative works, and (2) a relevant selection of additional works with study questions for further illustration of the topic. Also, in each chapter I include a list of review topics for the materials, and a list of Suggestions for Writing about those materials as they are illustrated elsewhere in the book.

The book opens with a section on “Writing about Literature,” which embraces the important assumption that the fullest understanding and appreciation of a literary work arises from the reader’s ability to express in language its meaning and emotional effects. The process of finding the right words to make these clear, and the additional clarity that results from the correct and effective presentation of these materials, is a significant part of making a work part of one’s experience.

Although the book emphasizes the study of literature, not writers, I have continued the practice of representing some authors with a sufficient number of works to support the study of them as individual artists. In the fiction section, I include three stories each by a great nineteenth- century writer (Nathaniel Hawthorne), by a important modernist writer ( Flannery O’Connor), and by a major contemporary author (Joyce Carol Oates). In this edition, there are also five poets amply represented as “Fea- tured Poets”: John Donne from the Renaissance, John Keats and Emily Dickinson from the nineteenth century, and Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath from the modern era. The table of contents gathers the titles of their poems in a boxed format for easy reference.

This edition also presents “A Contemporary Collection,” five poets repre- sented by six or more poems each, placed throughout the text: Billy  Collins, Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, and Natasha Trethewey. These too are identified in a boxed format in the table of contents.

xxviii PREFACE

Finally, to provide an introduction to the further works of individual poets, the book contains at least three poems each by more than two dozen writers, both classic and modern. These poems can easily be referenced in the index of the book.

In the drama section, I have maintained the practice of including a number of one-act plays, both within the section’s chapters and the additional “Plays for Further Reading,” so as to provide a wider range of dramatic styles and approaches, and to include contemporary playwrights of diverse backgrounds.

An Instructor’s Manual has again been prepared to accompany this book. It is available to all teachers who adopt the book for their classes. The manual contains an analytical article on every selection, suggesting approaches to interpretation and providing information that places the works in their contexts. These articles are the work of the author who pre- pared this edition as well as the man who created the first edition, Laurence Perrine, and the man who worked on the series for several decades, Thomas R. Arp. In the interests of space, the main text does not provide extended biographical information about the writers, but instructors and students who feel the need for such material are urged to consult Wadsworth’s valu- able Literature resource Center at http://trials.galegroup.com/thomson.

Through the thirteen editions of this book, which originated in the middle of the twentieth century, Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense has evolved in many ways, responding to shifts in interest, concern, and taste expressed by its users. However, certain abiding principles remain as rel- evant in the current century as they were in the last. Among these are the conviction that the close reading of a text is basic to understanding and appreciating it; that to understand the means by which a work achieves its ends is an essential part of experiencing it fully; and that reading imagina- tive literature is important to the development of the whole person.

G. J.

P RO F E S S I O N A L AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

The following instructors have offered helpful reactions and suggestions for this thirteenth edition of Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense.

Michael Coker Western Oklahoma State College

Eric Devillez Moraine Valley Community College

David C. Downing Elizabethtown College

Wayne Dunlop Mount Vernon Nazarene University

Richard Fellinger Elizabethtown College

Roger Friedmann Kansas State University

Karyn Hecht Moody Bible Institute

Marilyn Johnson Cabrini College

Cristina Karmas Graceland University

Douglas King Gannon University

Clark W. Lemons Oxford College of Emory University

Sally Levan Gannon University

Jerome McKeever Cuyahoga Community College

Cynthia Pettie Gallaudet University

Susan Smith Roads Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Kim Russell West Kentucky Community and Technical College

Mary Thornton Lon Morris College

xxix

Tracy Amaral Medway High School

Sara Berry School for Creative and Performing Arts

Scott Bokash South Lake High School

Keri Bostwick Bartlesville High School

Fred Bracher Castle High School

Elizabeth Brammer Robstown High School

Susan Buice Cherokee High School

Helen Chaffins Antioch High School

Diane Clark Sherman High School

Tara Cotton Millville Senior High School

Brad Edom East Union High School

Deborah Gill Jenks High School

Michelle Goins Union-Endicott High School

Sheri Goldstein Ida Crown Jewish Academy

Nicholas Jackson Herbert Hoover High School

Mary Jindra Mayfield High School

Melissa Kevonian Utica High School

William Kolbe Northern Garrett High School

Eric Larew Pleasant Valley High School

Jason Lovera Parkway Central High School

Jennifer Magrini St. Rose High School

John Manear Seton-La Salle High School

Shanna Miller Fruita Monument High School

Raymond Nighan St. John’s College High School

Beverly Slavens Arkadelphia High School

Kelly Stollings Watauga High School

Michele Sullivan Patchogue-Medford High School

Roberta Teran Lakewood High School

Michelle Waters Deep Creek High School

Sarah Whittier City and Country School

Wendi Wooddell Winter Haven High School

Sharon Wright Heritage High School

Leah Zika Prairie High School

Deidre Zongker Olathe North High School

AP REVIEWERS FOR PERRINE’S LITERATURE 13E

xxx

F O R E WO R D TO S T U D E N T S

You’ve been reading stories ever since you learned to read; your first exposure to verse came with “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man”; you’ve been watching dramatized life since your family planted you in front of the TV. You’ve developed your own tastes and your own attitudes toward what these varieties of “literature” can give you. In a sense, there’s no need to take an introductory course in reading literature, because you’ve moved beyond the “introductory” phase. Let’s say, then, that it’s time to become familiar and friendly with the literary arts.

But let’s take stock of where you stand. What have you been getting out of the things that you enjoy reading and watching? For most people, the first answer is “vicarious experience,” the impression that you are temporar- ily able to live in some other world than your own private one—a world that may be as familiar as your own neighborhood or as alien to your experience as space travel in some future time or the adventures of explorers of the past. What you want is for the author to take you to where you have never been, so that you can imagine yourself as a person in a world other than your own.

You probably also want to be able to “relate” to the characters in the things you read or watch, discovering in them some features of yourself or some qualities that you would like to have. Or you like to share vicariously the excitements, joys, and sorrows of people who are not very much like you, but whose lives seem rich and interesting. Or you get a lift from watching some characters making major mistakes with their lives, and turning themselves around just in time—or maybe you are thrilled to see such people brought to justice and punished for misdeeds.

Whatever the sources of your pleasure and enjoyment from read- ing, you may now be ready to find both broader and deeper reasons for continuing that pastime. No matter how much experience you bring to the study of these works, you’re in for a few surprises. Some of them will be the surprises that come from broadening your vicarious experience, from “traveling” with us to India and Russia, to Paris and Pittsburgh and Dublin, and to sixteenth-century London and seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Some will be the surprises that come from penetrating to the secret recesses of the human mind and soul in joys and agonies, from observing people whom you have never met or imagined and with whom you have nothing in common but your humanness.

xxxi

xxxii FOREWORD TO STUDENTS

And, we hope, there will be the surprises and pleasures that come from feeling yourself growing in control or even mastery of your responses and reac- tions as you learn how literature does what it does. This, of course, is what the formal study of literature can bring you. We all know how we feel when we first read through a work. We probably start by thinking “I like this” or “it doesn’t say much to me” or “what in the world is that supposed to mean?” If you could, you’d act on your first reaction and read the work again, or try to see what it’s trying to say, or drop it and go on to do something more pleasurable.

But you’re in a special situation. You’re taking a course (either by your own choice or because you’re required to), and one of the rules of the game is that you’re supposed to move from your initial reaction to some sort of “serious” response that will satisfy your teacher. If you like something and want to reread it, your teacher will pester you with wanting to know why you liked it, and might even insist that you offer reasons why other people should like it too. If you are only a little bit curious about it, or think that it is a waste of time, your teacher will lead (or nudge, or bash) you into finding things in it that might change your first opinion. In any case, the terms of your special situation, as a student in a course with a grade on the horizon, make it necessary for you to have more than an initial reaction. You’ll need to develop an understanding of the work, and you’ll need to show in discussion or writing both what you understand and how the work itself led to that understanding.

That’s where this book will help. In addition to a systematic guide for discovering how and what a literary work means, we’ve provided you with Suggestions for Writing at the ends of the chapters and standards for your written work in the first section of the book.

Why is writing so important? It’s the most straightforward way of sorting out your feelings and ideas, putting them into shape, nailing down your own experience. All writing about literature has a double motive—it sharpens your grasp of the work, and it helps you lead other people to share your experience. Writing about literature is writing persuasively, and persuading others to see what you see helps you to see it more clearly.

So at the most basic level, we want to help you with reading and writ- ing. But you have every right to ask, “Why literature?” That’s a good ques- tion, because in our world there are so many ways of gaining experience and insight into our lives and the lives of others that focusing on one resource based on the spoken and written word may seem narrow and old-fashioned. We’re willing to grant that, and we’ll go even further: in a sense, it is also elit- ist, and turning to literature as a source of experience will set you apart from the majority of people. Thus, literature provides not only vicarious experience and opportunities to relate to others’ lives, but it also permits you to join a special group of scholars, instructors, critics, and other students who share in the wealth of enjoyment and intellectual challenge that it has to offer.

Writing about

Literature

2 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

I. Why Write about Literature? 3 II. For Whom Do You Write? 3 III. Two Basic Approaches 5 1. Explication 5 2. Analysis 6 IV. Choosing a Topic 6 1. Essays That Focus on a Single Literary Work 7 2. Essays of Comparison and Contrast 7 3. Essays on a Number of Works by a Single Author 8 4. Essays on a Number of Works with Some Feature Other than

Authorship in Common 9

V. Proving Your Point 10 VI. Writing the Essay 11 VII. Writing In-Class Essays or Essay Tests 14 VIII. Introducing Quotations 15 1. Principles and Guidelines 16

IX. Documentation 22 1. Textual Documentation 23 2. Parenthetical Documentation 24 3. Documentation by Works Cited 27 4. Documentation of Electronic Sources 28

X. Stance and Style 30 XI. Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage: Common

Problems 33 1. Grammar 33 2. Punctuation 34 3. Usage 35

XII. Writing Samples 38 1. Fiction Explication: The Indeterminate Ending in “Where Are

You Going, Where Have You Been?” 38 2. Fiction Analysis: The Function of the Frame Story in “Once upon

a Time” 41 3. Poetry Explication: “A Study of Reading Habits” 43 4. Poetry Analysis: Diction in “Spring in the Classroom” 46 5. Drama Explication: Iago’s First Soliloquy 48 6. Drama Analysis: Othello’s Race 52

II. FOR WHOM DO YOU WRITE? 3

I. Why Write about Literature? Written assignments in a literature class have two purposes: (1) to

give you additional practice in writing clearly and persuasively, and (2) to deepen your understanding of literary works by leading you to read and think about a few works more searchingly than you might otherwise do. But these two purposes are private. To be successful, your essay must have a public purpose as well: it should be written to enlighten others besides yourself. Even if no one else ever reads your essay, you should never treat it as a private note to your instructor. You should write every essay as if it were intended for publication.

II. For Whom Do You Write? The audience for whom you write will govern both the content and

the expression of your essay. You need to know something about your readers’ backgrounds—national, racial, social, religious—and be able to make intelligent guesses about their knowledge, interests, and previous reading. In writing about George Herbert’s “Peace” (page 331) for a Hindu audience, you would need to include explanations of Christian belief and biblical stories that would be unnecessary for a western European or American audience. In presenting Graham Greene’s “The Destruc- tors” (page 105), your editors have felt it necessary to provide informa- tion (in footnotes) that would not be needed by a British audience; for “Los  Vendidos” by Luis Valdez (page 1239), footnotes provide translations and explanations that would not be necessary for an audience familiar with the Spanish-language slang of contemporary America. But the most crucial question about an audience is: Has it read the work you are writing about? The book reviewer in your Sunday paper generally writes about a newly pub- lished book that the audience has not read. A reviewer’s purpose is to let readers know something of what the book is about and to give them some notion of whether they will enjoy or profit from reading it. At an opposite extreme, the scholar writing in a specialized scholarly journal can generally assume an audience that has read the work, that has a knowledge of previ- ous interpretations of the work, and that is familiar with other works in its period or genre. The scholar’s purpose, not infrequently, is to persuade this audience that some new information or some new way of looking at the work appreciably deepens or alters its meaning or significance.

Clearly, essays written for such different audiences and with such dif- ferent purposes differ considerably in content, organization, and style. Book reviewers reviewing a new novel will include a general idea of its plot while being careful not to reveal the outcome. Scholars will assume that readers

4 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

already know the plot, and will have no compunction about discussing its outcome. Reviewers will try to write interestingly and engagingly about the novel and to persuade readers that they have valid grounds for their opinions of its worth, but their manner will generally be informal. Scholars are more interested in presenting a cogent argument, logically arranged and solidly based on evidence. They will be more formal, and may use critical terms and refer to related works that would be unfamiliar to non- specialized readers. In documentation the two types of essays will be quite different. Reviewers’ only documentation is normally the identification of the novel’s title, author, publisher, and price, at the top of the review. For other information and opinions, they hope that a reader will rely on their intelligence, knowledge, and judgment. Scholars, on the other hand, may furnish an elaborate array of citations of other sources of information, allowing the reader to verify the accuracy or basis of any important part of their argument. Scholars expect to be challenged, and they see to it that all parts of their arguments are buttressed.

For whom, then, should you write? Unless your instructor stipulates (or you request) a different audience, the best plan is to assume that you are writ- ing for the other members of your class. Pretend that your class publishes a journal of which it also constitutes the readership. Your instructor is the editor and determines editorial policy. If you write on a work that has been assigned for class reading, you assume that your audience is familiar with it. (This kind of essay is generally of the greatest educational value, for it is most open to challenge and class discussion and places on you a heavier burden of proof.) If you compare an assigned work with one that has not been assigned, you must gauge what portion of your audience is familiar with the unassigned work and proceed accordingly. If the unassigned story were A. Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” you would probably not need to explain that “Sherlock Holmes is a detective” and that “Dr. Watson is his friend,” for you can assume that this audience, through movies, TV, or reading, is familiar with these characters; but you could not assume familiarity with this particu- lar story for all audiences. You know that, as members of the same class, your readers have certain backgrounds and interests in common and are at com- parable levels of education. Anything you know about your audience may be important for how you write your essay and what you put in it.

Assuming members of your class as your audience carries another advantage: you can also assume that they are familiar with the definitions and examples given in this book, and therefore you can avoid wasting space by quoting or paraphrasing the book. There will be no need to tell them that an indeterminate ending is one in which the central conflict is left unresolved, or that Emily Dickinson’s poems are untitled, or that Miss Brill is an unmarried Englishwoman living in France.

III. TWO BASIC APPROACHES 5

III. Two Basic Approaches In a beginning study of literature, most writing will focus on a careful

reading of details of the assigned work as the basis for any further exploration. Traditionally, the approach will be structured as an explication or an analysis.

1. Explication An explication (literally, an “unfolding”) is a detailed elucidation of

a work, sometimes line by line or word by word, which is interested not only in what that work means but in how it means what it means. It thus considers all relevant aspects of a work—speaker or point of view, connota- tive words and double meanings, images, figurative language, allusions, form, structure, sound, rhythm—and discusses, if not all of these, at least the most important. (There is no such thing as exhausting the meanings and the ways to those meanings in a complex piece of literature, and the explicator must settle for something less than completeness.) Explication follows from what we sometimes call “close reading”—looking at a piece of writing, as it were, through a magnifying glass.

Clearly, the kinds of literature for which an explication is appropriate are limited. First, the work must be rich enough to repay the type of close attention demanded. One would not think of explicating “Pease Porridge Hot” (page 928) unless for purposes of parody, for it has no meanings that need elucidation and no “art” worthy of comment. Second, the work must be short enough to be encompassed in a relatively brief discussion. A thorough explication of Othello would be much longer than the play itself and would tire the patience of the most dogged reader. Explications work best with short poems. (Sonnets like Shakespeare’s “That time of year” [page 949] and Frost’s “Design” [page 855] almost beg for explica- tion.) Explication sometimes may also be appropriate for passages in long poems, as, for example, the lines spoken by Macbeth after the death of his wife (page 836) or the “sonnet” from Romeo and Juliet (page 955), and occasionally for exceptionally rich or crucial passages of prose, perhaps the final paragraphs of stories like “Paul’s Case” (page 247) or “Miss Brill” (page 101). But explication as a critical form should perhaps be separated from explication as a method. Whenever you elucidate even a small part of a literary work by a close examination that relates it to the whole, you are essentially explicating (unfolding). For example, if you point out the multiple meanings in the title of “Time Flies” (page 1113) as they relate to that play’s themes, you are explicating the title.

For examples of explication, see the three sample essays in Part XII of this section (pages 38–54). The discussions in this book display the

6 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

explicative method frequently, but except for the sample essays, there are no pure examples of explication. The discussions of “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (pages 794–795) and “Digging” (pages 797–800) come close to being explications and might have been so had they included answers to the study questions and one or two other matters. The exercises provided in “Understanding and Evaluating Poetry” on page 714 should be helpful to you in writing an explication of a poem. Not all the questions will be applicable to every poem, and you need not answer all those that are appli- cable, but you should start by considering all that apply and then work with those that are central and important for your explication.

2. Analysis An analysis (literally a “breaking up” or separation of something into

its constituent parts), instead of trying to examine all parts of a work in relation to the whole, selects for examination one aspect or element or part that relates to the whole. Clearly, an analysis is a better approach to longer works and to prose works than is an explication. A literary work may be usefully approached through almost any of its elements—point of view, characterization, plot, setting, symbolism, structure, and the like—so long as you relate this element to the central meaning or the whole. (An analysis of meter is meaningless unless it shows how meter serves the meaning; an analysis of the vocabulary and grammar of “Sweat” [page 569] would be pointless unless related to the characterization of the speakers.) The list of exercises on pages 94–96 may suggest approaches to stories, plays, and narrative poems; the list on page 714 to anything written in verse; and that on pages 1080–1081 to dramas. As always, it is important to choose a topic appropriate to the space available. “Characterization in Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ ” is too large a topic to be usefully treated in a few pages, but a character analysis of Paul or of his uncle and mother might fit the space neatly. For examples of analyses of three literary forms, see the sample essays in Part XII of this section (pages 38–54).

IV. Choosing a Topic As editor of this imaginary publication, your instructor is responsible

for the nature of its contents. Instructors may be very specific in their assignments, or they may be very general, inviting you to submit an essay on any subject within a broadly defined area of interest. They will also have editorial policies concerning length of essays, preparation of manuscripts, and deadlines for submission (all of which should be meticulously heeded).

IV. CHOOSING A TOPIC 7

Instructors may further specify whether the essay should be entirely the work of your own critical thinking, or whether it is to be an investiga- tive assignment—that is, one involving research into what other writers have written concerning your subject and the use of their findings, where relevant, to help you support your own conclusions.

Let us consider four kinds of essays you might write: (1) essays that focus on a single literary work, (2) essays of comparison and contrast, (3)  essays on a number of works by a single author, and (4) essays on a number of works having some feature other than authorship in common.

1. Essays That Focus on a Single Literary Work If your assignment is a specific one (How is the landscape symbolic

in “The Guest” [page 347]? What emotions are evoked by the imagery in “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” [page 763]?) your task is clear- cut. You have only to read the selection carefully (obviously more than once), formulate your answer, and support it with corroborating evidence from within the text as cogently and convincingly as possible. In order to convince your readers that your answer is the best one, you will need to examine and account for apparently contrary evidence as well as clearly supportive evidence; otherwise, skeptical readers, reluctant to change their minds, might simply refer to “important points” that you have “over- looked.”

Specific questions like these, when they are central to the work and may be a matter of dispute, make excellent topics for essays. You may dis- cover them for yourself when you disagree with a classmate about the inter- pretation of a story or poem or play. The study questions following many of the selections in this anthology frequently suggest topics of this kind.

If your assignment is more general, and if you are given some choice as to what selection you wish to write on, it is usually best to choose one you enjoyed, whether or not you entirely understood it. (You are more likely to write a good essay on a selection you liked than on one you disliked, and you should arrive at a fuller understanding of it while thinking through your essay.) You must then decide what kind of essay you will write, tak- ing into account the length and kind of selection you have chosen and the amount of space at your disposal.

2. Essays of Comparison and Contrast The comparison and contrast of two stories, poems, or plays having

one or more features in common may be an illuminating exercise because the similarities highlight the differences, or vice versa, and thus lead to a

8 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

better understanding not only of both pieces but of literary processes in general. The works selected may be similar in plot but different in theme, similar in subject but different in tone, similar in theme but different in literary value, or, conversely, different in plot but similar in theme, differ- ent in subject but similar in tone, and so on. In writing such an essay, it is usually best to decide first whether the similarities or the differences are more significant, begin with a brief summary of the less significant, and then concentrate on the more significant.

A number of selections in this collection have been included to encour- age just this kind of study: “The Most Dangerous Game” and “Hunters in the Snow” in Chapter 1 of the Fiction section; “The Necklace” and “Roman Fever” in Chapter 8; in the Poetry section, “Spring” and “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” in Chapter 4; all six pairs of poems in Chapter 9; “To the Snake” and “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” “Crossing the Bar” and “The Oxen,” “Dover Beach” and “Church Going” in Chapter 10; all poems in Chapter 15; and “Terence, this is stupid stuff” and “Ars Poetica” in Poems for Further Reading. In addition, many of the Suggestions for Writing at the ends of chapters group together comparable works.

3. Essays on a Number of Works by a Single Author Most readers, when they discover a work they particularly like, look

for other works by the same author. The essay that focuses on a single author rather than a single work is the natural corollary of such an interest. The most common concern in an essay of this type is to identify the char- acteristics that make this author different from other authors and therefore of particular interest to the writer. What are the author’s characteristic subjects, settings, attitudes, or themes? With what kinds of life does the author characteristically deal? What are the author’s preferred literary forms? Is the author’s approach ironic, witty, serious, comic, tragic? Is the author’s vision directed principally inward or outward? In short, what con- figuration of patterns makes the author’s fingerprints unique? Your essay may consider one or more of these questions.

Several writers are represented in this book by a sufficient number of works to support such an essay without turning to outside sources. In the Fiction section, three stories each by Nathaniel Hawthome, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates are grouped together for comparative study. In the Poetry section, there are numerous poems by John Keats, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Sylvia Plath, six or more poems each by authors listed in the table of contents as a “Contemporary Collection,” and at least three poems each by eighteen poets, both classic

and modern. The author listings in the index will help you locate the mul- tiple poems by a single author.

A more ambitious type of essay on a single author examines the works for signs of development. The attitudes that any person, especially an author, takes toward the world may change with the passing from adoles- cence to adulthood to old age. So also may the author’s means of expressing attitudes and judgments. Though some writers are remarkably consistent in outlook and expression throughout their careers, others manifest surpris- ing changes. To write an essay on the development of an author’s work, you must have accurate information about the dates when works were writ- ten, and the works must be read in chronological order. When you have mastered the differences, you may be able to illustrate them through close examination of two or three works, one for each stage.

When readers become especially interested in the works of a particu- lar author, they may develop a curiosity about that author’s life as well. This is a legitimate interest, and, if there is sufficient space and your edi- tor/instructor permits it, you may want to incorporate biographical infor- mation into your essays. If so, however, you should heed three caveats. First, your main interest should be in the literature itself: the biographical material should be subordinated to and used in service of your examina- tion of the work. In general, discuss only those aspects of the author’s life that bear directly on the work: biography should not be used as “filler.” Second, you should be extremely cautious about identifying an event in a work with an event in the life of the author. Almost never is a story, poem, or play an exact transcription of its author’s personal experience. Authors fictionalize themselves when they put themselves into imaginative works. If you consider that even in autobiographies (where they intend to give accurate accounts of their lives) writers must select incidents from the vast complexity of their experiences, that the memory of past events may be defective, and that at best writers work from their own points of view—in short, when you realize that even autobiography cannot be an absolutely reliable transcription of historical fact—you should be more fully pre- pared not to expect such an equation in works whose object is imaginative truth. Third, you must document the sources of your information about the author’s life (see pages 22–30).

4. Essays on a Number of Works with Some Feature Other than Authorship in Common You might also write a successful essay on works by various authors

that have some features in common, such as subject matter, form, setting, point of view, literary devices, and the like; discovering the ways in which

IV. CHOOSING A TOPIC 9

10 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

different works employ a particular feature can be illuminating. Probably the most familiar essay of this type is the one that treats works having a similar thematic concern (love, war, religious belief or doubt, art, ado- lescence, initiation, maturity, old age, death, parents and children, racial conflict, social injustice). But an essay may also examine particular forms of literature, for example, the Italian sonnet, the dramatic monologue, the short story with an unreliable narrator. Topics of this kind may be further limited by time or place or number—four attitudes toward death; Eliza- bethan love lyrics; poetry on the experience of war; satires of bureaucracy.

V. Proving Your Point In writing about literature, your object generally is to convince your

readers that your understanding of a work is valid and important and to lead them to share that understanding. When writing about other subjects, it may be appropriate to persuade your readers through various rhetorical means—through eloquent diction, structural devices that create suspense, analogies, personal anecdotes, and the like. But readers of essays about literature usually look for “proof.” They want you to show them how the work, or the element you are discussing, does what you claim it does. Like scientists who require proof of the sort that they can duplicate in their own laboratories, readers of criticism want access to the process of inference, analysis, and deduction that has led to your conclusions, so that they may respond as you have done.

To provide this proof is no easy task, for it requires the development of your own reading and writing skills. In addition, you must have developed a responsible interpretation of the work and of the way it achieves its effect; you should be able to point out precisely how it communicates its mean- ings; and you should be able to present your experiences of it clearly and directly. When you have spent considerable time in coming to understand and respond to a work of literature, it may become so familiar that it seems self-evident to you, and you will need to “back off” sufficiently to be able to put yourself in your readers’ position—they may have vague feelings about the work (“I like it” or “It moves me deeply”), without knowing what it is that produced those feelings. It is your job to refine the feelings and define away the vagueness.

Some forms of “proof” rarely do the job. Precision does not result from explaining a metaphor metaphorically (“When Shakespeare’s Juliet calls parting from Romeo a ‘sweet sorrow,’ the reader is reminded of taking bitter-tasting medicine”). Nor can you prove anything about a work by hypothesizing about what it might have been if it did not con- tain what it does (“If Desdemona had not lost her handkerchief, Othello

VI. WRITING THE ESSAY 11

would never have murdered her”—this is equivalent to saying, “If the play were not what it is, it would not be what it is”). Your own per- sonal experiences will rarely help your readers (“My anxiety, excitement, and awkwardness at my first skiing lesson were like the mixed feelings Prufrock imagines for himself at the tea party”—your reader hasn’t shared your experience of that lesson). Even your personal history of coming to understand a literary work will seldom help, though you present it in more general terms (“At a first reading, the opening paragraphs of ‘The Lottery’ are confusing because they do not explain why the villagers are gathering”—most literature does not yield up its richness on a first read- ing, so this approach has nothing to add to your reader’s understanding). Just as argument by analogy is not regarded as valid in formal logic, so in critical discourse, analogies are usually unconvincing (“Desdemona’s ignorance about adultery is like a child’s inability to balance a bank account”). These strategies all have in common the looseness and vague- ness of trying to define something by saying what it is not, or what it is like, rather than dealing with what it is.

“Proof” in writing about literature is primarily an exercise in strict definition. Juliet’s phrase “sweet sorrow” (quoted in the preceding para- graph) derives its feeling from the paradoxical linking of sweetness and grief as a representation of the conflicting emotions of love. To provide an appropriate definition of the effect of the phrase, you would need to identify the figure of speech as paradox and to investigate the way in which love can simultaneously inflict pain and give pleasure, and you might find it useful to point to the alliteration that ties these opposites together. Obviously, comparing this kind of proof to that required by science is inexact, since what you are doing is reminding your readers, or perhaps informing them, of feelings that are associated with language, not of the properties of chemical compounds. Furthermore, a scientific proof is incomplete if it does not present every step in a process. If that requirement were placed on literary analysis, a critical essay would be interminable, since more can always be said about any interpretive point. So, rather than attempting to prove every point that you make, you should aim to demonstrate that your method of analysis is valid by provid- ing persuasive proof of your major point or points. If you have shown that your handling of a major point is sound, your readers will tend to trust your judgment on lesser matters.

VI. Writing the Essay The general procedures for writing a good essay on literature are much

the same as the procedures for writing a good essay on any subject.

12 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

1. As soon as possible after receiving the assignment, read carefully and thoughtfully the literary materials on which it is based, mulling over the problem to be solved or—if the assignment is general—a good choice of subject, jotting down notes, and sidelining or underlining important passages if the book is your own. (If you use a library book, note the page or line numbers of such passages so that you can readily find them again.) Be sure to read the assigned material more than once.

2. Then, rather than proceeding directly to the writing of the essay, put the materials aside for several days and let them steep in your mind. The advantage of this is that your subconscious mind, if you have truly placed the problem in it, will continue to work on the problem while you are engaged in other activities, indeed even while you are asleep. Repeated investigations into the psychology of creativity have shown that great solu- tions to scientific and artistic problems frequently occur while the scientist or artist is thinking of something else; the answer pops into consciousness as if out of nowhere but really out of the hidden recesses of the mind, where it has been quietly incubating. Whether this apparent “miracle” happens to you or not, it is probable that you will have more ideas when you sit down to write after a period of incubation than you will if you try to write your essay immediately after reading the materials.

3. When you are ready to write (allow yourself as long an incubation period as possible, but also allow ample time for writing, looking things up, revising, copying your revision, and correcting your final copy), jot down a list of the ideas you have, select connecting ideas relevant to your problem or to a single acceptable subject, and formulate a thesis statement that will clearly express in one sentence what you wish to say about that subject. Make a rough outline, rearranging your ideas in the order that will best support your thesis. Do they make a coherent case? Have you left out anything necessary to demonstrate your thesis? If so, add it in the proper place. Then begin to write, using your rough outline as a guide. Write this first draft as swiftly as possible, not bothering about sentence structure, grammar, diction, spelling, or verification of sources. Concentrate on your outline and on writing down what is in your head without interrupting the flow of thought for any other purpose. If alternative ways of expressing a thought occur to you, put them all down for a later decision. Nothing is more unprofitable than staring at a blank computer screen, wondering, “How shall I begin?” Just begin. Get something written down. It may look awful, but you can shape and polish it later.

4. Once you have something written out, it is much easier to see what should be done with it. The next step is to revise. Does your essay proceed from an introductory paragraph that either defines the problem to

be solved or states your thesis, through a series of logically arranged para- graphs that either advance toward a solution of the problem or demonstrate your thesis, to a final paragraph that either solves the problem or sums up and restates your thesis but in somewhat different words? If not, analyze the difficulty. Do the paragraphs need reorganization or amplification? Are more examples needed? Does the thesis itself need modification? Make whatever adjustments are necessary for a logical and convincing demon- stration. This may require a rewriting of the essay, or it may call only for deletions, insertions, and shifting a sentence or paragraph from one place to another.

Notice that you are expected to organize your essay according to your purpose or thesis. This frequently will mean that you will not be moving paragraph-by-paragraph through a story, line-by-line through a poem, or speech-by-speech through a play, following the structure that the author created, but rather ordering your essay in the most effective way to make your point. If you do discuss a work following the order in which its mate- rials are presented, your reader will naturally expect your thesis to include some comment on the structure of the work. The exception to this is an essay devoted entirely to explication, since in that case you will be expected to follow the structure of the poem or the passage you are explicating.

5. In your revision (if not earlier), make sure that the stance expressed in your statements and judgments is firm and forthright, not weak and wishy-washy. Don’t allow your essay to become a sump of phrases like “it seems to me that,” “I think [or feel] that,” “this word might connote,” “this line could mean,” and “in my opinion.” Your readers know that the content of your essay expresses your thoughts; you need to warn them only when it expresses someone else’s. And don’t be weak-kneed in expressing your opinion. Even though you are not 100 percent sure of your rightness, write as if you are presenting a truth. Realizing beforehand that you will need to state your interpretations and conclusions confidently should also help you to strive for a greater degree of certainty as you read and interpret.

6. Having revised your essay for the logic, coherence, confidence, and completeness of its argument, your next step is to revise it for effectiveness of expression. Do this slowly and carefully. How many words can you cut out without loss of meaning? Are your sentences constructed for maximum force and economy? Are they correctly punctuated? Do the pronouns have clear antecedents? Do the verbs agree with their subjects? Are the tenses consistent? Have you chosen the most exact words and spelled them cor- rectly? Now is the time to use the dictionary, to verify quotations and other references, and to supply whatever documentation is needed. A conscien- tious writer may put an essay through several revisions.

VI. WRITING THE ESSAY 13

14 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

7. After all is in order, prepare your final copy, being sure to follow the editorial policies of your instructor for the submission of manuscripts.

8. Read over your final copy slowly and carefully, and correct any mistakes (omissions, repetitions, typographical errors) you may have made in revising your draft. This final step—too often omitted due to haste or fatigue—is extremely important and may make the difference between an A or a C essay, or between a C essay and an F. It is easy to make careless mistakes in copying, but your reader should not be counted on to recognize the difference between a copying error and one of ignorance. Moreover, the smallest error may utterly destroy the sense of what you have written: omission of a “not” may make your essay say exactly the opposite of what you meant it to say.

VII. Writing In-Class Essays or Essay Tests

You will often be asked in your literature courses to write essays in class or to write essay tests. The topic or assignment may be given to you in advance so that you can prepare for writing in the classroom, or you may be given the topic in the class when you will do the writing. If you have the topic early enough to prepare, you will want to follow the preparatory sug- gestions offered for writing a formal out-of-class essay. If the topic for your essay or test is not given out in advance, the following general approaches may be useful.

1. Analyze the topic. If you are asked to compare characters, or to discuss the implications of an event, or to define a concept and exemplify it, be sure that you do so. Pay attention to key words and such instructions as compare, show how, and especially define. If asked to compare, be sure you are drawing the comparison and not just giving two summaries; if asked to define, be sure your statement is in the form of a definition and does not just give examples. And be sure that you answer all parts of a ques- tion: consider whether it contains two or even three tasks within a single instruction.

2. For each question, take a little time to jot down a few key words or ideas that seem to be essential in answering the question, to keep yourself from spending all your time on one of the points but leaving out others of equal importance. If you can, decide which points are the most important and be sure to include them.

3. Try to begin your answer with a topic sentence that includes all the major points you intend to use in your essay. You can often get a good

VIII. INTRODUCING QUOTATIONS 15

topic sentence out of the question itself: if it says “Show how the frame story of Gordimer’s ‘Once upon a Time’ is related to the main story,” you might begin your essay, “The frame story involving a writer awakened by a frightening noise in the night introduces fear, the central topic of the main story, but the kinds of fear are distinctly different.”

4. Don’t give summaries of actions and plots unless you need to do so. You may need to give a brief summary, for example, in order to support a point; but be sure you are doing that rather than assuming that a summary will make a point. An essay test is not usually the place to prove that you have read the assigned material, but that you can use your reading.

5. Be specific and concrete. Prove your points with facts—named charac- ters, specific actions, concrete details of plot, and even paraphrases or quotations from speeches if you can recall them (but don’t quote unless you have indeed memorized them, and do not place quotation marks around paraphrases).

6. Keep an eye on the clock and budget your time. If you are asked to write two essays with equal time allotments, and you answer only one, then your maximum score can be no more than 50 percent—no matter how well you answer the one. If you have time, review and revise your writing, making corrections as neatly as you can. When moving whole paragraphs or blocks of writing, be sure your final intention is clear. And take all the time that is allotted to you—if you think you have said everything you can, then spend the time in revision.

VIII. Introducing Quotations In writing about literature it is often desirable, sometimes impera-

tive, to quote from the work under discussion. Quoted material is needed (1) to provide essential evidence in support of your argument, and (2) to set before your reader any passage that you are going to examine in detail. It will also keep your reader in contact with the text and allow you to use felicitous phrasing from the text to enhance your own presentation. You must, however, be careful not to overquote. If an essay consists of more than 20 percent quotation, it loses the appearance of closely knit argument and seems instead merely a collection of quotations strung together like clothes hung out on a line to dry. Avoid, especially, unnecessary use of long quotations. Readers tend to skip them. Consider carefully whether the quoted material may not be more economically presented by paraphrase, or whether the quotation, if judged necessary, may not be effectively short- ened by ellipsis (see Q9 on page 21). Readers faced with a long quotation may reasonably expect you to examine it in some detail; that is, the longer your quotation, the more you should do with it.

16 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

As a general rule in analytical writing, quotation should be included for the purpose of supporting or proving a point, not for the purpose of re- creating the experience of a work for your reader. You may assume that your reader has already read the work and does not need to have it summarized— but on the other hand, you should not send your reader back to the book to reread in order to understand what you are referring to. Analysis is the process of demonstrating how the parts work together to create the whole; it must examine these parts in detail and show how they work together. Quoting presents details, and analysis shows how the details do what you say they do. If a quotation seems entirely self-evident to you, so that you have nothing to explain about it, then it is not really worth quoting. If it is self-evident, your reader has already understood all there is to know about it.

As with every other aspect of good writing, the use of quotation is a mat- ter of intelligence and tact. There are no hard-and-fast rules, since the amount of material you quote and the way you explain the significance of your quota- tions will vary, depending on the work you are writing about and the kind of essay you are writing. In general, however, you should limit direct quotation to words, phrases, or short passages that are so well written and illuminat- ing that to paraphrase them would dilute the force of your argument. Such quotation strengthens your own writing by showing that you have mastered the material and can offer the crucial evidence directly from the text. On the other hand, if the content of a passage (especially a long passage) is more signifi- cant than the specific language the author uses, then a paraphrase is probably adequate. Either way, be sure that you quote or paraphrase selectively, keeping your own ideas about the work in the foreground; and also be sure that your quotation or paraphrase directly supports your argument.

1. Principles and Guidelines There is no legislative body that establishes laws governing the formal

aspects of quoting, documenting, or any other aspect of writing. The only “rules” are the editorial policies of the publisher to whom you submit your work. (In the case of essays being written as class assignments, your “pub- lisher” is your instructor.) There is, however, a national organization—the Modern Language Association of America—that is so influential that its policies for its own publications and its recommendations for others are adopted by most journals of literary criticism and scholarship. The instruc- tions below are in general accord with those stated in the MLA Handbook, 8th edition (MLA, 2016). In your course, your instructor will inform you of any editorial policies in effect that differ from those given here or in the MLA Handbook. The examples we use here are all drawn from act 5, scene 2 of Othello.

Q1. If the quotation is short (normally not more than four typed lines of prose or not more than two or three lines of verse), put it in quotation marks and introduce it directly into the text of your essay.

Othello, before stabbing himself, reminds his listeners, “I have done the state some service and they know ’t.” He speaks of himself as “one that loved not wisely but too well” and compares himself to “the base Indian” who “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe” (5.2.338–47).

a

b

c

Q2. If the quotation is long (normally more than four typed lines of prose or more than three lines of verse), begin it on a new line (and resume the text of your essay on a new line also); double-space it (like the rest of your essay); and indent it twice as far from the left margin (one inch) as you do for a new paragraph indentation (one-half inch). If it is verse and has lines either too long or too short to look good with a one-inch indentation, center the quotation between the margins. Whether verse or prose, do not enclose it in quotation marks. Since the indentation and the line arrangement both signal a quotation, the use of quotation marks would be redundant.

In the final scene, convinced that Desdemona is en- tirely innocent and having decided to kill himself, Othello says to his auditors:

I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice (5.2.339–42)

The two boxed examples illustrate the “run-in” quotation (Q1), where the quotation is “run in” with the writer’s own text, and the “set-off” or “block” quotation (Q2), which is separated from the writer’s text.

VIII. INTRODUCING QUOTATIONS 17

18 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

Q3. In quoting verse, it is extremely important to preserve the line arrange- ment of the original because the verse line is a rhythmical unit and thus affects meaning. When more than one line of verse is run in, the lines are separated by a virgule (or diagonal slash) with one letter-space on each side, and capital- ization after the first line follows that of the original (see Q1.c above).

Q4. In general, sentences containing a quotation are punctuated as they would be if there were no quotation. In Q1.a above, a comma precedes the quoted statement, as it would if there were no quotation marks. In Q2, a colon precedes the quoted sentence because it is long and complex. In Q1.b and Q1.c, there is no punctuation at all before the quotation. Do not put punctuation before a quotation unless it is otherwise called for.

Q5. Your quotation must combine with its introduction to make a gram- matically correct sentence. The normal processes of grammar and syntax, like the normal processes of punctuation, are unaffected by quoting. Subjects must agree with their verbs, verbs must be consistent in tense, pronouns must have their normal relation with antecedents.

Othello says, “One that loved not wisely but too well” (5.2.343). (Incomplete sentence)

Othello speaks of himself as “one that loved not wisely but too well” (5.2.343).

WRONG

RIGHT

Othello asks his auditors to “speak of me as I am” (5.2.341). (The pronouns “me” and “I” do not agree in person with their antecedent.)

Othello bids his auditors,

Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well. (5.2.341–43)

WRONG

RIGHT

Othello says that “I have done the state some service” (5.2.338). (Incorrect mixture of direct and indirect quotation)

Othello says, “I have done the state some service” (5.2.338).

WRONG

RIGHT

Q6. Your introduction must supply enough context to make the quota- tion meaningful. Be careful that all pronouns in the quotation have clearly identifiable antecedents.

Othello says that he “have done the state some service” (5.2.338). (Subject and verb of subordinate clause lack agreement.)

Othello says that he has “done the state some service” (5.2.338).

WRONG

RIGHT

In the final speech of the play, Lodovico says, “Look on the tragic loading of this bed: / This is thy work” (5.2.362–63). (Whose work?)

In the final speech of the play, Lodovico says to Iago, “Look on the tragic loading of this bed: / This is thy work” (5.2.362–63).

WRONG

RIGHT

VIII. INTRODUCING QUOTATIONS 19

20 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

Q7. The words within your quotation marks must be quoted exactly from the original.

Though Iago bids his wife to “hold [her] peace,” Emilia declares, “I will speak as liberal[ly] as the north [wind]” (5.2.218–19).

Though Iago bids his wife to hold her peace, Emilia declares that she will speak as liberally as the north wind.

CORRECT

BETTER

Iago bids his wife to “hold your [her] peace” (5.2.218).WRONG

Q8. It is permissible to insert or supply words in a quotation if you enclose them within brackets. Brackets (parentheses with square corners) indicate your changes or additions. If parentheses were used, the reader might interpret the enclosed material as the author’s (as part of what you are quoting). Avoid excessive use of brackets: they make quotations more difficult to read and comprehend. Often paraphrase will serve as well as quotation, particularly if you are not explicitly analyzing the language of a passage.

Notice that a word within brackets can either replace a word in the original (as in the substitution of her for “your” above) or be added to explain or complete the original (as with -ly and wind above). Since a reader understands that brackets signal either substitutions or additions, it is superfluous to include the words for which substitutions have been made.

Though Iago bids his wife to “hold her peace,” Emilia declares, “I will speak as liberally as the north wind” (5.2.218–19).

WRONG

After Iago’s treachery has been completely exposed, Lodovico tells Othello:

You must forsake this room, and go with us. Your power and your command is taken off. And Cassio rules in Cyprus. For this slave [Iago], If there can be any cunning cruelty That can torment him much and hold him long, It shall be his. (5.2.329–34)

RIGHT

Your sentences, including bracketed words, must read as if there were no brackets:

In her dying speech, Emilia asks her dead mistress, “Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan, / And die in music. ‘Willow, willow, willow’” (5.2.246–47)

Q9. It is permissible to omit words from quoted material, but only if the omission is indicated. Three spaced periods are used to indicate the omission (technically they are called “ellipsis points”). If there are four periods, the first is the normal period at the end of a sentence; the other three indicate the ellipsis.

The statement just concluded, if quoted, might be shortened in the following way: “It is permissible to omit words . . . if the omission is indicated. Three spaced periods are used to indicate the omission. . . . If there are four periods, the first is the normal period at the end of a sentence.”

It is usually not necessary to indicate ellipsis at the beginning or end- ing of a quotation (the very act of quoting implies that something precedes and follows)—unless what you quote is in some way contradicted by its context, as for example by a “not” preceding the material you quote.

Q10. Single quotation marks are used for quotations within quotations. Thus, if the material you are quoting in a run-in quotation includes a quotation, you should reduce the original double quote marks to single quote marks. (In a block quotation, the quotation marks would remain unchanged.)

VIII. INTRODUCING QUOTATIONS 21

22 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

Single quotation marks are not used for any other purposes and should not be substituted for double quotes.

Q11. At the conclusion of a run-in quotation, commas and periods are con- ventionally placed within quotation marks; semicolons and colons are placed outside. (The convention is based on appearance, not on logic.) Question marks and exclamation marks are placed inside if they belong to the quoted sentence, outside if they belong to your sentence. (This is based on logic.) Special rules apply when the quotation is followed by parenthetical documen- tation (see PD3 and PD4, page 26). The following examples are all correct:

“I am not valiant neither,” says Othello (5.2.242).

Othello says, “I am not valiant neither” (5.2.242).

“Who can control his fate?” cries Othello (5.2.264).

Does Shakespeare endorse Othello’s implication that no one “can control his fate”? (5.2.264).

IX. Documentation Documentation is the process of identifying the sources of materials

used in your essay. The sources are of two kinds: primary and secondary. Primary sources are materials written by the author being studied, and may be confined to the single work being discussed. Secondary sources are mate- rials by other writers about the author or work being discussed, or materials having some bearing on that work. Documentation serves two purposes: (1) it enables your readers to check any material they may think you have misinterpreted and (2) it enables you to make proper acknowledgment of information, ideas, opinions, or phraseology that are not your own.

It is difficult to overemphasize the second of these purposes. The use of someone else’s ideas or insights in your own words, since it does not require quotation marks, makes an even heavier demand for acknowledg- ment than does quoted material. Although you need not document matters of common knowledge, your use without acknowledgment of material that is uniquely someone else’s is not only dishonest but also illegal (plagia- rism), and could result in penalties ranging from an F on the essay through

IX. DOCUMENTATION 23

expulsion from school to a term in jail, depending on the magnitude of the offense.

Documentation may be given in (1) the text of your essay, including the essay’s footnotes or endnotes; (2) parentheses placed within the text of your essay; or (3) a list of Works Cited placed at the end of your essay but keyed to parenthetical references within the essay. The three methods are progressively more formal.

In any case, the type of documentation required in your class will be chosen by your instructor, who may wish to have you practice several meth- ods so that you will learn their use.

1. Textual Documentation Every literary essay contains textual documentation. A title like “Dra-

matic Irony in Oedipus Rex” identifies the play that will furnish the main materials in the essay. A paragraph beginning “In scene 2 . . .” locates more specifically the source of what follows. An informally documented essay is one that relies on textual documentation exclusively. Perhaps the majority of articles published in newspapers and periodicals with wide circulation are of this kind. Informal documentation works best for essays written on a single short work, without use of secondary sources, for readers with- out great scholarly expectations. A first-rate essay might be written on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” using only textual documenta- tion. The author’s name and the title of the story mentioned somewhere near the beginning of the essay, plus a few phrases such as “In the opening para- graph” or “When Bartleby answers the lawyer’s advertisement for additional scriveners” or “At the story’s conclusion” might provide all the documentation needed for this audience. The action of the story is straightforward enough that the reader can easily locate any detail within it. If the essay is intended for our hypothetical journal published by your literature class (all of whose members are using the same anthology and have presumably read the story), its readers can readily locate the story and its events. But textual documenta- tion, although less appropriate, can also be used for more complex subjects, and can even accommodate secondary sources with phrases such as “As Yvor Winters points out in his essay on Melville in In Defense of Reason. . . .”

Principles and Guidelines TD1. Enclose titles of short stories, articles, one-act plays, and poems (unless they are book-length) in quotation marks; underline or italicize titles of full-length plays, magazines, newspapers, and books. Do not underline, italicize, or use quotation marks around the title of your own

24 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

essay. The general principle is that titles of separate publications are underlined or italicized; titles of selections or parts of books are put within quotation marks. Full-length plays, such as Othello and Oedipus Rex, though often reprinted as part of an anthology, are elsewhere published as separate books and should be underlined or italicized.

TD2. Capitalize the first word and all important words in titles. Do not capitalize articles, prepositions, and conjunctions except when they begin the title (“The Lottery,” “Hunters in the Snow,” “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”).

TD3. When the title above a poem is identical with its first line or a major part of its first line, there is a strong presumption that the poet left the poem untitled and the editor or anthologist has used the first line or part of it to serve as a title. In such a case you may use the first line as a title, but should not refer to it as a title. For example, you might write that “Dickinson’s ‘There’s a certain slant of Light’ is a powerful poem about a depressed psychological state.” But you should not write, “Dickinson repeats her title in the first line of ‘There’s a certain slant of Light’ because she wants to emphasize her main point.” In using it as a title, capitalize only those words that are capitalized in the first line.

TD4. Never use page numbers in the body of your discussion because a page is not a structural part of a story, poem, or play. You may refer in your discussions to paragraphs, sections, stanzas, lines, acts, or scenes, as appropriate, but use page numbers only in parenthetical documentation where a specific edition of the work has been named.

TD5. Spell out numerical references when they precede the unit they refer to; use numbers when they follow the unit (the fifth act, or act 5; the second paragraph, or paragraph 2; the fourth line, or line 4; the tenth stanza, or stanza 10). Use the first of these alternative forms sparingly, and only with small numbers. Never write “In the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth lines . . .,” for to do so is to waste good space and irritate your reader; write “In lines 34–35. . . .”

2. Parenthetical Documentation Parenthetical documentation makes possible fuller and more precise

accrediting without a forbidding apparatus of footnotes or an extensive list of Works Cited. With a full-length play like Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, a phrase such as “midway through scene 4” is insufficient to allow the reader to locate the passage readily. This can be done by giving a page number, within parentheses, after the passage cited. But the reader

needs to know also what book or edition the page number refers to, so this information must be supplied the first time such a citation is made.

Parenthetical documentation is the method most often required for an essay using only the primary source, or, at most, two or three sources—as, for example, most of the writing assigned in an introductory literature course. The information given in parenthetical documentation should enable your reader to turn easily to the exact source of a quotation or a reference. At the first mention of a work (which may well precede the first quotation from it), full publishing details should be given, but par- enthetical documentation should supplement textual documentation; that is, information provided in the text of your essay should not be repeated within the parentheses. For the readers of our hypothetical class journal, the first reference in an essay on Williams’s play might look like this:

In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (reprinted in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 13th ed. [Wadsworth, 2017] 1188–1237), Tom occa- sionally addresses the audience directly.

Notice in this entry that brackets are used for parentheses within parentheses. In subsequent references, provided no other source intervenes, only the page number need be given:

Amanda defines her fear that she and Laura will be deserted when she compares Tom to his father: “He was out all hours without explanation!—Then left! Good-bye! And me with the bag to hold” (1205).

If you use more than one source, each must be identified—if referred to a second time, by an abbreviated version of the first citation. Normally this will be the author’s last name or, if you cite several works by a single author, the work’s title or a shortened version of it; in any case, use the shortest identification that will differentiate the source from all others.

Principles and Guidelines PD1. For the first citation from a book, give the author’s name; the title of the selection; the name of the book from which it is taken; the editor (preceded by the abbreviation ed. for “edited by”) or the transla- tor (preceded by the abbreviation trans. for “translated by”); the edition (designated by a number) if there has been more than one; the city of

IX. DOCUMENTATION 25

26 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

publication (the first one will suffice if there is more than one); the pub- lisher (this may be given in shortened form, dropping all but the first name); the year of publication or of most recent copyright; and the page number. The following example correctly combines textual with paren- thetical documentation:

In “Home Burial,” Frost has a husband complain, “ ‘A man must partly give up being a man / With womenfolk’ ” (The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem [New York: Holt, 1969] 52).

PD2. For your principal primary source, after the first reference, only a page number is required. Since the paragraphs of the stories in this book are numbered, your instructor may prefer you to supply the paragraph number rather than the page number. For long poems, it may be useful to give line numbers or stanza numbers rather than page numbers. If a poem is short, line numbers are unnecessary and should be omitted. For plays in verse, citation by line number (preceded by act and scene number) will usually be more useful than citation by page number—for example, Othello (5.2.133).

PD3. Documentation for run-in quotations always follows the quotation marks. If the quotation ends with a period, move it to the end of the docu- mentation. If it ends with an exclamation point or question mark, leave it, but put a period after the documentation as well. The following examples are from Othello:

“She was false as water” (5.2.133).

“Alas, what cry is that?” (5.2.116).

PD4. With block quotations, parenthetical documentation follows the last mark of punctuation without further punctuation after the parentheses:

Out and alas! That was my lady’s voice. Help! Help, ho! Help! O lady, speak again! Sweet Desdemona! O sweet mistress, speak!

(5.2.118–20)

PD5. Avoid cluttering your essay with excessive documentation. When possible, use one note to cover a series of short quotations. (See example, Q1.) Remember that short poems need no parenthetical documentation at all after the first reference. Do not document well-known sayings or proverbs that you use for stylistic purposes and that form no part of the

substance of your investigation (and of course be wary of including hack- neyed commonplaces in your formal writing).

PD6. It is customary in a formal essay to document all quoted materi- als. Do not, however, assume that only quotations need documentation. The first purpose of documentation (see page 22) is to allow the reader to check the primary text concerning any major or possibly controver- sial interpretation. If you declare that the turning point in a long story occurs with an apparently minor event, it may be more important for the reader to have a page number for that event than for any quotation from the story. Judgment must be exercised. You cannot and should not provide page numbers for every detail of a story; but neither should you think that you have necessarily done your duty if you only document all quotations.

3. Documentation by Works Cited When your assignment involves the use of secondary sources, your

instructor may require you to create a list of “Works Cited,” to be located at the end of your essay. Any book, article, website, or other source you use or quote from must be referenced parenthetically in the body of your paper so that the reader can easily locate the source in your Works Cited list.

Your first step should be to create the Works Cited list (no longer called a “bibliography”) in the format detailed in the MLA Handbook mentioned earlier. Then you should locate each instance in your essay where you have quoted from or paraphrased a source or where your ideas have been formed by reading a source. In order to identify the source, you should normally give the author’s last name and the page number to which you are indebted.

For example, let’s say you are writing a research essay on Emily Dickinson and one of your sources is David Porter’s book The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry. Typically you would cite a reference to the book in this manner: (Porter 141). There are some instances, however, where more information might be needed. David Porter wrote a second book on Dickinson called Dickinson: The Modern Idiom. If both of Porter’s titles are in your Works Cited list, you need to identify the source parenthetically with an abbreviation of the particular book you are citing. These might read as follows: (Porter, Early Poetry 141) or (Porter, Modern Idiom 252). The key principle is that you should keep the parenthetical citations both as brief and as clear as possible, so that the reader will have no trouble finding the particular source you are citing.

Here is another example of when you must provide some information in addition to the last name and page number: you might have two authors

IX. DOCUMENTATION 27

28 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

on your Works Cited list with the last name of Smith. In this case, you need to be specific about which of the two authors you are quoting. Thus the parenthetical citations might read (Mary Smith 88) or (John Smith 138). Note that the first name is required only when there are two sources on the Works Cited list whose authors have the same last name.

Always keep the MLA Handbook nearby when preparing the par- enthetical documentation and the Works Cited list. Different types of sources—for instance, a newspaper story or an article from an anthology with multiple editors—require different formats, and examples of all these are located in the Handbook.

Here is a sample Works Cited page from an essay on Emily Dickin- son. Note that the list should start on a new page and be double-spaced, and note the proper method of abbreviation for publishers’ names—for example, “Harvard UP” rather than “Harvard University Press.” Also remember to indent after the first line of an entry. When two titles are by the same author, like the entries for David Porter here, the second and any subsequent listings of the author’s name should be replaced by a straight line.

Works Cited

Buckingham, Willis J. Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Bibliography. Indiana UP, 1970.

Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. “Dickinson and Bloom: An Antithetical Reading of Romanticism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Vol. 23. 1981: 414–41.

Porter, David. The Art of Dickinson’s Early Poetry. Harvard UP, 1966.

____________. Dickinson: The Modern Idiom. Harvard UP, 1981.

Wilson, Suzanne M. “Structural Patterns in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” American Literature. Vol. 35. 1963: 53–59.

4. Documentation of Electronic Sources When doing research online, you need to be sure that the information

is reliable, since much of what is available is uncredited or incorrect. As with all research, the quality of your essay will be directly affected by the quality of its sources.

Electronic sources are cited in your essay as parenthetical references and then included in your list of Works Cited. Examples include personal web- sites; online books, magazines, and newspapers; and materials obtained from a library subscription service such as LexisNexis. Unlike textual sources, which usually clearly state author, title, date of publication, and publisher, electronic sources may or may not provide such information. Whatever the format, you will need to provide information that enables your reader to access the exact source of your materials.

Your parenthetical citations normally will include the name of the author and a page number. If the source is not paginated, the name of the author may suffice; if it is divided by paragraphs, sections, or screen numbers, after the author’s name use the abbreviations “par.,” “sec.,” or the word “screen” followed by the appropriate number. Here are some examples from an essay on James Joyce’s “Araby”:

A scholarly project or information database: According to many scholars, James Joyce’s “Araby” is best understood if studied at both a realistic and a symbolic level (Gray 1).

A document within a scholarly project or information database: “Araby” was first published in Irish Homestead in 1904 (“James Joyce”).

An article in a scholarly journal: Most scholars contend that “Araby” is an initiation story recounting a young man’s first bitter taste of reality (Coulthard).

An article in an encyclopedia: Joyce often used stream of consciousness, a technique that allows authors to capture their character’s complete flow of interior thoughts and feelings (“Stream of Consciousness” par. 2).

Works from online services: Often lacking courage and honesty, the anti-hero reflects modern man’s ambivalence toward traditional social mores (“Anti-hero” sec. 2). Dublin, and its long history of legal and cultural repression, heavily influenced Joyce’s writing (“Dublin” par. 2).

A CD-ROM nonperiodical publication: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “araby” is a romantic word for the Middle East (“Araby”).

In your list of Works Cited, Internet sources should include both the date of the electronic publication (if available) and the date you accessed

IX. DOCUMENTATION 29

30 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

the source, and should also include the URL. These are the Works Cited for the previous examples:

Gray, Wallace. “James Joyce’s Dubliners: An Introduction by Wallace Gray.” World Wide Dubliners by James Joyce. Ed. Roger B. Blumberg and Wallace Gray. 1997. Brown U. Web. 5 Sep. 2004 www.mendele .com/WWD/home.html.

“James Joyce.” Contemporary Authors. 2003. Gale Group. Web. 3 Sep. 2004 www.galenet.com/servlet/LitIndex/.

Coulthard, A.R. “Joyce’s ‘Araby’.” Explicator 52 (1994): 97–100.

Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. U Texas Lib. Austin, TX. Web. 6 Sept. 2004 www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/s-literaturesinenglish.html.

“Stream of Consciousness.” Britannica Online. 2004. Encyclopedia Britan- nica. Web. 2 Sep. 2004 www.britannica.com.

“Anti-hero.” Encyclopedia. 2004. Infoplease.com. Web. 1 Sep. 2004. Key- word: James Joyce.

“Dublin.” Encyclopedia. 2004. Infoplease.com. Web. 6 Sep. 2004. Path: James Joyce; Irish Literary Renaissance; History; Republic of Ireland.

“Araby.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. CD-ROM. Oxford UP, 2001.

The Internet and other electronic sources provide a great variety of materials, and there are many complex variations on the examples we have given you. For the fullest possible range of correct references, consult the MLA Handbook.

X. Stance and Style In section II, “For Whom Do You Write?” we discussed the assumed

audience for your critical writing. Now we must consider the other half of the reader/writer equation. We might ask the parallel question “Who Are You?” except that that would imply that we are asking about your own personal identity. Rather, since we defined your audience hypothetically as members of your class, we need to define “you” in terms of the voice that your audience will expect and appreciate. There are certain conventional expectations that are aroused when we read critical analyses of literature, and the following suggestions may lead you to adopt the stance that your readers will expect. If these sound prescriptive (or if your instructor suggests others), remember that writing about literature is essentially persuasive writing, its purpose being to persuade your readers to agree with

X. STANCE AND STYLE 31

It seems to me that Welty uses the name Phoenix to symbolize endurance and persistence.

Welty uses the name Phoenix to symbolize endurance and persistence.

The name Phoenix symbolizes endurance and persistence.

POOR

GOOD

BETTER

your interpretation; the means of persuasion are many, and the writer’s stance is only one of them. What we advise here are a few “hints” that have been valuable to students in the past, and may be helpful to you.

S1. Avoid first-person pronouns. This injunction warns you away from unnecessarily intruding yourself into your critical statements, with a con- sequent loss of power and precision. Consider the relative force of these approaches:

Welty uses the name to symbolize endurance. (This focuses on Welty [subject] and uses [verb].)

The name symbolizes endurance. (Subject, name; verb, symbolizes.)

POOR

GOOD

The first example dilutes the statement by making it sound tenta- tive and opinionated. It allows your reader to respond, “Why should I consider that seriously, since the writer confesses that it’s only a private opinion rather than a fact?” As a critic, you should adopt the stance of the sensitive person who is confident of the accuracy of her or his insights— even when in your heart you may feel tentative or unsure. Say it with an air of confidence.

The third example is “better” because it observes the following suggestion:

S2. Write about the work. When analyzing a work of literature or some aspect of it, you should be sure that the thesis or topic of a paragraph or essay (and its thesis sentence) focuses on your topic. You will usually not be writing about an author but about a work, so try to avoid using the author’s name as the subject:

32 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

Try also to avoid the verb uses, since your focus is not on a writer using a technical device but on the result of that use; not on an author selecting a device to achieve a purpose but on the result of that selection. The easiest way to get rid of the word use or the idea of using is simply to delete them:

Welty uses the name to symbolize . . .

The name symbolizes . . .

POOR

GOOD

The plot is structured on Phoenix’s journey.

Phoenix’s journey gives structure to the plot.

POOR

GOOD

The revised version cuts the wordiness and is more direct.

S3. Be cautious about passive constructions. In analyzing literature, the pas- sive voice presents three potential problems: (1) it may fail to identify its subject and thus (2) may introduce vagueness, and (3) it is often a weak and wordy way to say something that you can say directly and forcefully. It may also be a roundabout way to write about an author rather than a work:

S4. Be cautious about praise. Praising a work or writer with such adverbs as cleverly, remarkably, beautifully, and so forth, is much less effective than pre- senting and analyzing the details that you find praiseworthy. Your opinion is important, but your reader wants the opportunity to share it—and such labeling doesn’t really afford that opportunity.

S5. Avoid preparatory circumlocution. Don’t write a “table of contents” as an introductory paragraph, and eliminate such phrases as “in order to understand X we must examine Y.” Just go ahead and examine Y, and trust your reader to recognize its relevance. Another example: “Z is a significant aspect of the poem” (or, a little worse, “It is interesting to note that Z is a significant aspect”). If Z is significant, just go ahead and say what it signi- fies; if it is interesting, let what is interesting about it be your topic.

Such circumlocution is sometimes called “treading water,” since it is generally only a way of keeping afloat on the page until you get a good idea of the direction you really want to swim. You wouldn’t walk into a room and announce, “I am now going to tell you that I’m here,” or “I will tell you how interested you’ll be to notice that I’m here.” You’d say, “Here I am!”

It is perfectly all right to use such space-wasters in preliminary drafts—as ways of keeping your pen or keyboard in action while you are

XI. GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, AND USAGE: COMMON PROBLEMS 33

figuring out which way you are going to swim. Just be sure to edit them from your finished text.

S6. Avoid negative hypotheses. Negative hypothesis is introduced with an example in Section V, “Proving Your Point.” Here’s another: “If Phoenix Jackson’s grandson had not swallowed lye, she would not have made her trip to the city.” But he did, so a critical analysis can neither speculate about what might have happened under other circumstances, nor prove by comparison that what happens is better or worse—there is nothing to compare.

On the other hand, in the process of coming to understand a work (as distinct from presenting the results of that process in your writing), it can be valuable to entertain such hypotheses. For example, in discussing con- notation, we suggest that imagining possible alternative words can sharpen your appreciation of the poet’s actual choice (see study questions for Dickinson, “There is no Frigate like a Book” [page 744]).

XI. Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage: Common Problems

1. Grammar G1. In discussing the action of a literary work, rely primarily on the pres- ent tense (even when the work itself uses the past), keeping the past, future, and perfect tenses available for prior or subsequent actions; for example,

When Phoenix reaches the city she has undergone many adventures, and when she receives the soothing medicine, she will return home to give it to her grandson.

G2. Do not let pronouns refer to nouns in the possessive case. Antecedents of pronouns should always hold a strong grammatical position: a possessive is a mere modifier, like an adjective:

In Shakespeare’s play Othello, he writes . . . (Antecedent of “he” is in possessive case.)

In his play Othello, Shakespeare writes . . . (Antecedent of “his” is the subject of the sentence.)

WRONG

RIGHT

34 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

2. Punctuation P1. The insertion of a parenthetical phrase in your sentence structure (as, for example, in parenthetical documentation) does not alter the normal punctuation of the rest of the sentence. Do not, as the preceding sentence doesn’t, place a comma after a parenthetical phrase unless it belonged there before the parenthesis was inserted. You wouldn’t write, “Welty’s story, touches upon racial issues,” so don’t include that comma when you insert a parenthesis.

In her story, “A Worn Path,” Welty . . . (The title of the story is necessary to the meaning of the statement. As punctuated, the sentence falsely implies that Welty wrote only one story.)

In her story “A Worn Path,” Welty . . .

In her story in chapter 4 of Perrine’s Literature, “A Worn Path,” Welty . . . (The chapter number identifies the story. The title simply supplies additional information and could be omitted without changing the meaning.)

WRONG

RIGHT

RIGHT

And it is an inflexible rule of punctuation: never place a comma immediately before a parenthesis.

P2. Do not set off restrictive appositives with commas. A restrictive appositive is one necessary to the meaning of the sentence; a nonrestrictive appositive could be left out without changing the meaning.

Welty’s “A Worn Path” (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, 13th ed. [Wadsworth, 2017] 227–233), touches upon racial issues in the early twentieth century. (Delete the comma after the parenthesis.)

WRONG

The word describing the seal and frame is gold. (This statement is false; all the words in the story are black.)

The word describing the seal and frame is “gold.”

WRONG

RIGHT

P3. Words used simply as words should be either underlined or italicized, or put in quotation marks.

Since the word “gold” is quoted from the story, it has here been put in quotation marks. However, if you list a series of words from various parts of the story, you may prefer underlining or italicizing for the sake of appear- ance. Whichever system you choose, be consistent throughout your essay.

P4. Observe the conventions of typed manuscripts: (1) put a space after an abbreviating period (p. 7, not p.7; pp. 10–13, not pp.10–13); (2) use two hyphens to represent a dash—and do not put spaces before and after them.

P5. Observe the standard for forming possessives. For a singular noun, add an apostrophe and an s (a student’s duty, yesterday’s mail, the dress’s hemline). For a plural noun, add only an apostrophe (the students’ duties, seven days’ mail). For proper nouns, the same rules apply (Camus’s “The Guest,” Chekhov’s “Misery,” Ives’s play).

Do not confuse the contraction it’s (it is) with the possessive its (belonging to it). Its is an exception to the general rule requiring apostrophes for possessives.

3. Usage U1. Though accepted usage changes with time, and the distinctions between the following pairs of words are fading, many instructors will bless you if you try to preserve them.

convince, persuade Convince pertains to belief (conviction); persuade pertains to either action or belief. The following sentences observe the dis- tinction. In Othello, Iago convinces Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful. He then persuades him to strangle rather than poison her.

describe, define Describe means to delineate the visual appearance of something; define means to state the meaning of a word or phrase, or to explain the essential quality of something. Reserve describe and description for talking about how things look.

XI. GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, AND USAGE: COMMON PROBLEMS 35

36 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

disinterested, uninterested A disinterested judge is one who has no stake or personal interest in the outcome of a case and can therefore judge fairly; an uninterested judge goes to sleep on the bench. A good judge is interested in the case but disinterested in its outcome. An uninterested reader finds reading boring. A disinterested reader? Perhaps one who can enjoy a good book whatever its subject matter.

imply, infer A writer or speaker implies; a reader or listener infers. An implication is a meaning hinted at but not stated outright. An inference is a conclusion drawn from evidence not complete enough for proof. If you imply that I am a snob, I may infer that you do not like me.

lover, beloved In older literature, the word lover usually meant one of two things—a man who is sexually involved, or any person who feels affec- tion or esteem for another person or persons. In the case of the former, lover generally designated the male partner and beloved his female partner. In the case of the latter usage, no sexual implications are involved.

quote, quotation The word quote was originally only a verb. Today the use of the terms “single quotes” and “double quotes” in reference to quotation marks is almost universally accepted; but, although the use of “quote” for the noun “quotation” is common in informal speech, it is still unacceptable in formal writing.

Note also that quoting is an act performed by the writer about literature, not by the writer of literature:

Shakespeare’s famous quotation “To be or not to be” . . .

The famous quotation from Shakespeare, “To be or not to be” . . .

WRONG

RIGHT

sensuous, sensual Sensuous normally pertains to the finer senses, sensual to the appetites. Good poetry is sensuous: it appeals through the imagina- tion to the senses. A voluptuous woman, an attractive man, or a rich dessert may have a sensual appeal that stirs a desire for possession.

U2. Some words and phrases to avoid are the following. center around A geometrical impossibility. A story may perhaps center

on a certain feature, but to make it center around that feature is to make the hub surround the wheel.

just as This phrase as a term of comparison is too precise for literary analysis because the adjective just means exactly or identical in every possible way, almost an impossibility when discussing literature. You should take the trouble to establish the points of similarity and dissimilarity between things that you are comparing.

lifestyle An overused neologism, especially inappropriate for use with older literature, that is too general to mean much. One dictionary defines it as “a person’s typical approach to living, including his moral attitudes, preferred entertainment, fads, fashions, etc.” If you wish to define someone’s moral attitudes, do so; if you try to define a person’s “lifestyle,” you have a monumental task of all-inclusive definition. It’s easier just to avoid it.

society The problem with this word is that it is too often used only vaguely as a substitute for some more precise idea. Any story, poem, or play that does deal with “society” will clearly indicate a particular society—the world of segregated white middle-class people in South Africa’s apartheid system in “Once upon a Time,” or the paternalistic society of Norway in the late nineteenth century in A Doll House. In those cases, once one has defined the particular society and its characteristics, the term might legitimately be used. But don’t use it simply to mean “people in general at that time in that place.” And it is important to avoid the glib assumption that society makes a person do something. A person’s desire to be a member of a social group may lead to actions that appear to be imposed or forced, but what makes a person conform is the desire to be or remain a member, not the fact that there are codes of behavior.

somewhat (also rather, more or less, as it were, in a manner). All of these terms are specifically designed to avoid or evade precision—to create a sense of vagueness. Since clarity and precision are the goals of critical analy- sis, these terms should be avoided. They also sound wishy-washy, while you should strive to sound firm and convinced.

upset As an adjective to define an emotional condition, the word is just too vague. Your dictionary will tell you that its synonyms are “distressed, disturbed, agitated, perturbed, irritated,” and so forth. All of those terms are more precise than upset, and the one that most nearly indi- cates your meaning should be chosen.

what the author is trying to say is The implication of this expression is that the author failed to say it. You don’t say “I’m trying to get to Boston” if you are already there; give the author credit for having got where he or she was going.

XI. GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, AND USAGE: COMMON PROBLEMS 37

38 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

XII. Writing Samples

1. Fiction Explication

The Indeterminate Ending in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

The concluding paragraphs of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 13th ed. [ Wadsworth, 2017] 502–516) have frequently been explicated by critics, in part because of their seeming indeterminacy. After her long, frighten- ing encounter with Arnold Friend, the protagonist Connie finally submits to his wishes that she open the back screen door and join him and his sinister friend, Ellie Oscar, in Friend’s bizarre golden jalopy. What happens next is unknown, however, for we are left suspended at her moment of submission, and similarly unknown is her true motive for acquiescing to Friend. Has she simply become entranced by Friend’s hypnotically suggestive insistence that she submit? Is she acting out of a kind of altruism, in order to spare her family the gruesome fate at which Arnold Friend has hinted if she refuses to comply? These ques- tions give the ending paragraphs an aura of mystery that helps make this story a perennially fascinating one for discussion and debate.

The story, it should be pointed out, has carefully prepared for this ending. Connie, only fifteen, is perhaps a “typical” teenager of her time and place, and we have seen her characterized appealingly as being naïve as well as rebellious, both of which are appropriate to her

Others suggested by your instructor: _______________________ __________________________

_______________________ __________________________

_______________________ __________________________

_______________________ __________________________

_______________________ __________________________

XII. WRITING SAMPLES 39

age. Arnold Friend, by contrast, is a considerably older (around thirty) and threatening, even demonic figure who tries to make himself look younger by the evident use of makeup and hair dye, and by using slang expressions popular with the teenagers with whom he mingles. In the second half of the story, after Friend arrives at Connie’s house and begins his drawn-out seduction of her, wanting her to come with him and Oscar in the jalopy, Connie’s mood shifts from wise-cracking dismissal and skepticism, to slow-building anxiety, and finally, by the end, to outright terror.

The final couple of pages show Connie in a state of fear so extreme that she becomes detached from her surroundings and unable to resist Friend’s persistent suggestions that she open the screen door and come outside to join him. We are told of her “pounding heart” and, in a careful choice of words on the narrator’s part, we are told that “she watched herself push the door slowly open” (516). Such descriptions suggest that Connie now suffers a fearfulness so extreme that she is numbed both physically and men- tally, and that she no longer quite understands the possible conse- quences of her acquiescence to Friend.

Rather than using rough language or violent means to attain his ends, Friend continues to cajole her; his self-possession during the final scene is in marked contrast to Connie’s zombielike compliance. He calls her “My sweet little blue-eyed girl”—even though Connie has brown eyes—and speaks in a “half-sung sigh” (516). This seeming gentleness as a prelude to rape and likely murder (the story is based on the case of a serial killer who operated in Arizona and was dubbed by the media “the Pied Piper of Tucson”) gives the final scene its pow- erfully macabre and sinister impact. The scene suggests, above all, Connie’s helplessness; she knows that if Friend wanted, he could eas- ily force his way through the screen door, and it is clear that Ellie Oscar is brandishing a gun.

The final paragraph confirms Connie’s fatal detachment from her surroundings even as it provides the story’s indeterminate end- ing. Connie fails to recognize the surrounding land she sees outside, even though she’s in her own house and has viewed the landscape

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countless times in the past. Yet the narrator insists that this was “so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it” (516). What will happen next, however, remains outside the story’s purview: Oates could have nar- rated a rape and murder, but the suggestiveness of the indeterminate ending is in fact more powerful, and has given rise to other interpreta- tions of what will happen. For instance, in the film version of the story, entitled Smooth Talk and directed by Joyce Chopra, Arnold Friend takes Connie away in his jalopy, almost certainly for a sexual tryst, but then brings her back home, where she has the brief conversation with her sister, June, which ends the film. One can understand Chopra’s predica- ment, for as Oates later said, the text itself provides an “unfilmable” conclusion because its effect is based on its lack of a visually pre- sented, definite, determined fate for Connie. The director thus chose a “happy ending” rather than the tragic implications most readers take from the text itself.

By withholding a neatly determined closure in the final paragraphs, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is in line with con- temporary fiction generally, which prefers not to provide tidy narrative packages but privileges a rich suggestiveness and ambiguity that leave much to the reader’s imagination. However one imagines Connie’s ulti- mate fate, this story’s ending is clearly a triumph of careful and effec- tive storytelling that powerfully haunts the imagination and forces the reader to confront the lack of certainty and determinacy that character- izes life itself.

Comments Although this essay does not provide a line-by-line explication of the

passage, its handling of key words and phrases and its limitation to one paragraph for its evidence qualify it as explicative. It summarizes the major event in the story not for purposes of narration but in order to provide necessary background material for explicating the mystery that it presents. Since there is only one documented source, the citations from the story need not use the author’s name. The date of publication of the story is not documented since it is known to the hypothetical readers of the essay who have read the introductory footnote in the text.

2. Fiction Analysis

The Function of the Frame Story in “Once upon a Time”

Nadine Gordimer’s “Once upon a Time” (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 13th ed. [Wadsworth, 2017] 234–239) is a complex, ironic presentation of the results of fear and hatred. This “children’s story,” so flat in its tone, characterization, and reporting of events, proceeds by gradual steps to show a family systematically barricading itself behind various security devices, the last of which has an effect opposite of what was intended in destroying the child that the parents are trying to protect.

The tale is especially harrowing because of the tone hinted at in the title. This is an easy, casual narration that repeats such standard storybook phrases as “living happily ever after” (235) and identifies its characters only by their functions and relationships, never exploring motivations or revealing the steps of their decision making. The deeper causes for fear are not defined in the tale. All these qualities, and oth- ers, establish the tone of fairy tales and other stories for children. In this story, however, no one lives “happily ever after,” for in attempting to safeguard themselves, the parents destroy their lives.

But that tale doesn’t begin until the ninth paragraph of Gordimer’s story. What precedes it is the frame story of a writer who has been asked to write a story for a children’s collection, who refuses to con- tribute, and then is awakened in the night by some noise that frightens her. Her fear first chillingly conjures up a burglar or murderer “moving from room to room, coming up the passage—to [her] door” (247). Then the actual cause of her waking comes to her: deep down, “three thousand feet below” her house, some rock face has fallen in the gold mine beneath (248). She is not in personal danger, then. Yet she can- not return to sleep, so she tells herself “a bedtime story” to relax her mind—and the story is of the family that grows obsessed with security and protection, the awful story of the mutilation of the little boy.

The frame story initially seems little more than an introductory explanation of how the tale came to be written, against the writer’s will and purpose. Its details are unrelated to the children’s tale—explicitly

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so, as the writer, despite her knowledge of two recent murders in her neighborhood, and the rational fears that such events arouse, has “no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow” (234), in contrast to the pre- cautions taken in the tale. There is no fairy-tale gold mine in her life, only the knowledge of the mining of gold a half-mile beneath her. So what does this frame have to do with the tale, other than to place the reader within the literal reality of a writer’s time and place, from which the imagination journeys to “once upon a time”? Is it more than an ironic contrast in subject and tone?

For answers, we need to consider the writer’s time and place as parallels to those of the tale. Both are located in South Africa, both are in the present (even though the phrase “once upon a time” normally signals a long time ago, in a far-off place). The family in the tale, with their burglar bars, walls, alarms, and finally “the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house,” are like those people in the writer’s world who do keep guns under their pillows. Like the real people of the writer’s neighborhood, the family focuses its fears on the black African populace who surround and outnumber them. On the one hand, in the writer’s world, the fears focus on “a casual laborer . . . dismissed with- out pay” who returns to strangle the watchdogs and knife the man who treated him unfairly (235); on the other hand, in the children’s story, the fears focus on the hungry, out-of-work, and begging multitudes who fill and spoil the suburban streets of the fictitious family’s neighborhood. In both worlds, unfairness, want, and deprivation mark the blacks, while the whites feel surrounded and threatened by them.

Why cannot the writer return to sleep after she has discovered the innocent cause of her awakening? Because the comforting natural explanation, which removes her from personal danger, is in fact more horrifying than a murderous prowler. She thinks of

the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might [be] down there, under [her] in the earth at that moment. The stope where the [rock] 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. (235)

Two possibilities occur to her—one of no harm to men, the other of burial alive—both a consequence of the wage-slavery of “migrant miners” over whose heads (literally and figuratively) the white society lives in “uneasy strain . . . of brick, cement, wood and glass” (235). If no miner has been harmed by this rock fall, others have been and will be; and moreover, being killed in that subterranean world of “ruptured veins” is not the only harm that the whites have inflicted on the original inhabitants of the country they control, nor on their own sensitivities and consciences.

The frame story of “Once upon a Time,” then, foreshadows the fear, the violence, and the pain of the children’s tale, and points to the ultimate cause of its terrible sacrifice of a child—the systematic mal- treatment of one race by another and the brutality and self-destruction that are its result.

Comments This analysis has as its subject an aspect of the story that the writer can

fully develop in the limited space. It is written for our hypothetical class journal, as indicated by the way in which the writer refrains from giving a detailed summary of the tale enclosed in the frame (since the audience is known to be familiar with the story), and presents details from the frame narration as they support the writer’s argument. It employs some informa- tion about the author that is common knowledge to the class (her national- ity and her contemporaneity are in the introductory footnote to the story). Quotations are integrated into the writer’s sentence structures, and the writer interpolates words within the extended quotation.

3. Poetry Explication

“A Study of Reading Habits”

The first noteworthy feature of Philip Larkin’s “A Study of Reading Habits” (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 13th ed. [Wadsworth, 2017] 728) is the ironic discrepancy between the formal language of its title and the colloquial, slangy, even vulgar language of the poem itself. The title by its tone implies a formal sociological research paper, possibly one that samples a cross section of a population and draws conclusions about

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people’s reading. The poem presents, instead, the confessions of one man whose attitudes toward reading have progressively deteriorated to the point where books seem to him “a load of crap.” The poem’s real subject, moreover, is not the man’s reading habits but the revelation of life and character they provide.

The poem is patterned in three stanzas having an identical rhyme scheme (abcbac) and the same basic meter (iambic trimeter). The stanzaic division of the poem corresponds to the internal structure of meaning, for the three stanzas present the speaker at three stages of his life: as schoolboy, adolescent, and adult. Larkin signals the chronological progression in the first lines of the stanzas by the words “When,” “Later,” and “now.” The “now” is the present out of which the adult speaks, recalling the two earlier periods.

The boy he remembers in stanza 1 was unhappy, both in his home and, even more so, at school. Perhaps small and bullied by bigger boys, probably an indifferent student, making poor grades, and scolded by teachers, he found a partial escape from his miseries through read- ing. The books he read—tales of action and adventure, pitting good guys against bad guys, full of physical conflict, and ending with victory for the good guy—enabled him to construct a fantasy life in which he identified with the virtuous hero and in his imagination beat up villains twice his size, thus reversing the situations of his real life.

In stanza 2 the speaker recalls his adolescence when his dreams were of sexual rather than muscular prowess. True to the prediction of “ruining [his] eyes” in stanza 1, he had to wear spectacles, which he describes hyperbolically as “inch-thick”—a further detriment to his social life. To compensate for his lack of success with girls, he envisioned himself as a Dracula figure with cloak and fangs, enjoying a series of sexual triumphs. His reading continued to feed his fantasy life, but, instead of identifying with the virtuous hero, he identified with the glamorous, sexually ruthless villain. The poet puns on the word “ripping” (the speaker “had ripping times in the dark”), implying both the British slang meaning of “splendid” and the violence of the rapist who rips the clothes off his victim.

In stanza 3 the speaker, now a young adult, confesses that he no longer reads much. His accumulated experience of personal

failure and his long familiarity with his shortcomings have made it impossible for him to identify, even in fantasy, with the strong virtu- ous hero or the viciously potent villain. He can no longer hide from himself the truth that he resembles more closely the weak second- ary characters of the escapist tales he picks up. He recognizes him- self in the undependable dude who fails the heroine, or the cowardly storekeeper who knuckles under to the bad guys. He therefore has turned to a more powerful means of escape, one that protects him from dwelling on what he knows about himself: drunkenness. His final words are memorable—so “unpoetical” in a traditional sense, so poetically effective in characterizing this speaker. “Get stewed,” he tells himself. “Books are a load of crap.”

It would be a serious mistake to identify the speaker of the poem, or his attitudes or his language, with the poet. Poets, unless they are in a cynical or depressed mood, do not think that “books are a load of crap.” Philip Larkin, moreover, an English poet and a graduate of Oxford, was for many years until his death a university librarian (Ian Hamilton, ed., Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry [Oxford UP, 1994] 288). “A Study of Reading Habits” is both dramatic and ironic. It presents a first-person speaker who has been unable to cope with the reality of his life in any of its stages and has therefore turned toward various means of escaping it. His confessions reveal a progressive deterioration of values (from good to evil to sodden indifference) and a decline in reading tastes (from adventure stories to prurient sexual novels to none) that reflect his downward slide.

Comments The title of this essay is enclosed in quotation marks because the writer

has used the title of the poem for the title of the essay. The essay uses tex- tual and parenthetical documentation. Line numbers for quotations from the poem are not supplied because the poem is too short to require them: they would serve no useful purpose. Notice that in quoting from stanza 1, the writer has changed the phrase “ruining my eyes” to fit the essay’s syntax, but has indicated the alteration by putting the changed word within brackets. The essay is written for an American audience; if it had been written for an English audience, the writer would not have needed to explain that “ripping” is British slang or to have made it a point that

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the poet is English. The essay is documented for an audience using this textbook. If it were directed toward a wider audience, the writer would want to refer, for his text of the poem, not to a textbook or anthology but to the volume of Larkin’s poetry containing this poem (Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite [London: Faber, 1988] 31). Also, the writer would prob- ably wish to include the poet’s name in the title: Philip Larkin’s “A Study of Reading Habits” (or) An Examination of Larkin’s “A Study of Reading Habits.” Since Larkin’s nationality and his profession as a librarian are not common knowledge, the essay documents a biographical source where that information is found.

4. Poetry Analysis

Diction in “Spring in the Classroom”

Mary Oliver’s “Spring in the Classroom” (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 13th ed. [Wadsworth, 2017] 746–747) surprisingly juxtaposes two con- trasted concepts throughout the poem, providing much of its charm as well as its poetic unity. As the poem builds toward its surprise ending, it uses thoughtful and colorful diction to illustrate these con- cepts.

The poem is divided into two stanzas: in the first, the speaker sets the scene; in the second, she convincingly dramatizes the con- trasted concepts through human action. The entire poem employs a first-person plural point of view, suggesting that the particular identity of the speaker is unimportant. She is simply one of a classroom full of like-minded students who while away the school hours by staring out the window and wishing they could escape outside to enjoy the beautiful spring afternoon.

In the first stanza, the two contrasted concepts become clear: one presents the “dry” (1) atmosphere of the classroom, while the other portrays the “greening woodlot” (3) typifying the natural beauty outside, which the students watch with such longing. The classroom has the teacher, “Miss Willow Bangs” (2), the boring lessons, and the barrier-like windows that keep the students inside. The woodlot, however, has “secrets and increases” (4), “hidden nests and kind” (5). Contemplating

it, the children feel “warmed” (6), their “old mud blood murmuring” (7), the latter phrase emphasizing its importance through assonance and alliteration. When the students feel too bored, they carve their initials into desk with small knives, in the time-honored schoolroom tradition, and the speaker specifies that their initials are “pulsing” (11) with the “mud blood” mentioned above. The stanza concludes that the children are indignant to be confined, “without pity and beyond reason” (12) by their teacher, whose physical description suggests (deceptively, as it turns out) that she is part of the dry schoolroom atmosphere, “her eyes two stones behind glass,/Her leg thick, her heart/in love with pencils and arithmetic” (13–15).

The second stanza pulls back from such close observation to summarize the students’ unhappy condition, sitting “like captives” (17) with “one gorgeous day lost after another” (16). They are so angry, the speaker asserts, that they could easily be led to “plot mutiny, even murder” (20). But then the surprising ending arrives:

And the one day, Miss Willow Bangs, we saw you As we ran wild in our three o’clock escape Past the abandoned swings; you were leaning All furry and blooming against the old brick wall In the Art Teacher’s arms. (22–26)

Here the diction once again underscores the meaning, for it turns out that Miss Willow Bangs, far from being a cruel prison warden, also must have been suffering, from the dry, unnatural confinement indoors, and longed to be “furry and blooming” in concert with the rest of the natural world outside.

Even the diction found in the poem’s title implies the contrasted concepts present throughout the poem. “Spring in the Classroom,” in the speaker’s eyes, is almost a conflict in terms, since spring, she feels, should be a time when one is out of doors. The classroom with all its dryness and confinement represents everything against which the speaker’s childlike heart rebels. Only through the careful, selective use of diction is the speaker able to dramatize this dominant theme.

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Comments The title of this essay is not set off in quotation marks—the writer

uses them only to set off the title of the poem. Line numbers are given for all direct quotations, except when the quotation is being used a second time. Note that the writer does not use every possible detail in the poem to support its thesis, but simply chooses those that underscore the essay’s argument most effectively. The essay includes the general meaning of the poem as an orientation for the meaningful presentation of the details, but its main focus is on the quality of language as that contributes to the gen- eral meaning.

5. Drama Explication

Iago’s First Soliloquy

At the end of the first act of Othello, the Moor of Venice (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 13th ed. [Wadsworth, 2017], 1303–1395), Iago delivers the first of his several soliloquies (1.3.363–84). In this act Iago has initiated the action by leading Roderigo to announce to her father Desdemona’s elopement with Othello. The result is Brabantio’s violent accusation of Othello and his estrangement from his daughter. Most of Iago’s time on the stage has been with Roderigo, whom he manipu- lates first in inducing him to cause trouble for Othello and dismay to Brabantio, and then at length in persuading him to pursue Desdemona to Cyprus (having first gathered up as much money as he can).

Iago begins the soliloquy justifying to himself spending time with such a fool as Roderigo:

Thus do I ever make my fool my purse, For I mine own gained knowledge should profane If I would time expend with such a snipe But for my sport and profit. (363–66)

That he feels the need to justify such an association is implied by the terms he uses to describe him—“fool,” “snipe,” and, at the end of the soliloquy, “ass.” Roderigo is no fit companion for a man of such

“gained knowledge”—that is, a man of Iago’s accomplishments and wisdom. We may sense in this not only his contempt for Roderigo, but pride in his own superiority, a pride that is evidenced elsewhere in this soliloquy as well. For example, he alludes to Roderigo at the end when he says that Othello “will be as tenderly led by the nose / As asses are.” What he gains from associating with this “snipe” is “sport and profit”—the pleasure of manipulating and controlling someone, and the monetary gain that he plans to receive. How Roderigo’s money becomes Iago’s, we learn much later: he persuades Roderigo to give him cash to purchase jewels to bribe Desdemona into sleeping with the young man, but of course he pockets the money rather than buying her presents (see 4.2.184–88 and 5.1.15–17).

After these four lines of self-justification, Iago turns to Othello. He has already at length told Roderigo of his duplicity in serving the general, and has given a reason for hating him: Othello has promoted Cassio ahead of Iago, thus thwarting his ambitions (1.1.8–65). In the soliloquy, ambition takes a back seat to other motives:

I hate the Moor, And it is thought abroad that twixt my sheets He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true, But I for mere suspicion in that kind Will do as if for surety. (366–70)

We must not read this too quickly, or we might miss the disconnect between the first line and what follows. He does not say “I hate the Moor” because I suspect him of sleeping with my wife; rather, those appear as two distinct motives, one explicit, the other general and vague. His hatred is almost abstract, a flat statement of loathing with- out a supporting cause. His jealousy, on the other hand, though based merely on rumors (and vigorously refuted by Emilia later in the play), is at least a humanly comprehensible motivation. And he does not repeat what he has told Roderigo, that he hates Othello because he bypassed him for promotion. Rather, that comes in as he begins to plot his revenge for having been cuckolded:

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[Othello] holds me well, The better shall my purpose work on him. Cassio’s a proper man. Let me see now, To get his place, and to plume up my will In double knavery.—How, how?—Let’s see.— (370–74)

He enjoys the irony that Othello’s admiration for him will make the general more vulnerable to his plotting. But even more delightful to him is the proud prospect of “double knavery,” taking revenge on Othello and supplanting Cassio as lieutenant, and thus “plum[ing] up [his] will” by cre- ating a two-part plot that will bring down Cassio as well as Othello. What he has against Cassio personally (as opposed to his professional jeal- ousy) is implied in the brief sentence referring to Cassio’s handsomeness. As he explains much later, Cassio “hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly” (5.1.19–20). He is jealous of Cassio’s social and physi- cal superiority; Cassio is as far above him in grace as he himself is supe- rior to Roderigo in craft and intelligence. And as he goes on to say, Cassio

hath a person and a smooth dispose To be suspected, framed to make women false. (377–78)

It is characteristic of Iago that he perceives the virtues in oth- ers, and in his thinking twists them into weaknesses or vices. Othello esteems him, which will make him less suspicious; Cassio is hand- some, which makes him a threat to women. He goes on in this vein:

The Moor is of a free and open nature That thinks men honest that but seem to be so. (379–80)

Othello’s lack of guile, his own honesty, make him the more vulnera- ble to a guileful, dishonest schemer like Iago. He concludes the soliloquy with an echo of an earlier remark of his:

I have’t. It is engendered. Hell and night Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light. (383–84)

In advising Roderigo to prepare for his trip to Cyprus, Iago tells him, “There are many events in the womb of time which will be deliv- ered” (1.3.353–54). He ends the soliloquy proudly announcing that he himself has impregnated that “womb of time,” and the offspring will be “monstrous.”

The essence of the plot is expressed with great simplicity:

After some time, to abuse Othello’s ear That [Cassio] is too familiar with [Othello’s] wife. (375–76)

This monstrous lie seems to Iago a perfect revenge—and one that inadvertently suggests Iago is not in fact jealous of Othello’s sleeping with Emilia, for this perfect circle of wife-for-wife will culminate not in Desdemona’s infidelity but in the illusion of it. We may well wonder if Iago does in fact believe in his own wife’s disloyalty, since he is plotting a lie about Desdemona’s.

There is one more example of Iago’s proud self-estimation in the soliloquy, his assertion of his strong will. Of Othello’s supposed sexual relations with Emilia, he says,

I know not if’t be true, But I for mere suspicion in that kind Will do as if for surety. (368–70)

His boast is that he is not the sort of man who waits and inves- tigates (a man of “gained knowledge”), but one who will take drastic action even on “mere suspicion.” It is a curious assertion, since the subsequent events seem to show the opposite—and may even be contradicted here by his plan to induce Othello’s jealousy only “After some time.”

What this soliloquy reveals is that Iago takes great pride in his manipulative abilities, that he has a mixture of motives, and that he is not entirely consistent. These are traits that we can follow throughout the play.

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Comments The essay restricts its references to the text of the play, so parenthetical

documentation is appropriate. While it explicates the whole soliloquy, it does not simply “read” the speech from beginning to end, but rather struc- tures its argument according to the writer’s several points that characterize Iago. Its conclusion draws attention to the importance of the speech in establishing character traits that can be observed in the rest of the play.

6. Drama Analysis

Othello’s Race

The subtitle of Othello is The Moor of Venice, a term that can be misleading if we rely on a standard desk dictionary for a definition of “moor.” For example, the Random House College Dictionary defines it thus: “Moor . . . a Muslim of mixed Berber and Arab people inhabit- ing NW Africa.” The American Heritage Dictionary agrees with that definition and adds an alternative: “one of the Saracens who invaded Spain in the eighth century A.D.” But these definitions do not match the facts in the play.

Othello is presented as a Christian, not a Muslim. Iago refers to his “baptism” (2.3.308), and in his first meeting with Desdemona on Cyprus he clearly alludes to their shared belief in Christian salvation (2.1.184–90).

But more importantly, he is throughout the play characterized as a black African. A fuller definition of the word “moor” can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary: “in the Middle Ages, and as late as the 17th c. . . ., Moors were commonly supposed to be mostly black, . . . and hence the word was often used for ‘negro.’”

In the opening scene Roderigo refers to Othello’s negroid fea- tures by calling him “the thick-lips” (1.1.66), and Iago insultingly refers to his race (“an old black ram,” “a Barbary horse” [1.1.88, 110–11]). Brabantio’s public denunciation of him in 1.3 is clearly calling him black. He himself in his soliloquy trying to cope with Desdemona’s supposed rejection of him in favor of Cassio explicitly

calls himself “black” (3.3.264), and later in that scene in referring to Desdemona’s supposed sinful lust says:

Her name, that was as fresh As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face. (3.3.387–89)

The play also establishes a racist bigotry about Othello’s color, chiefly in the assumptions revealed by Brabantio in his distress over Desdemona’s marriage to the Moor. When he learns of it from Iago and Roderigo in 1.1, he declares to Roderigo “would you had had her” (1.1.173), though he has already reminded Roderigo that he had rejected him as a suitor for his daughter—that is, any white man would be preferable to a black. This attitude is supported by his assumption that a mixed marriage is “in spite of nature” and “against all rules of nature” (1.3.96, 101). That she is aware of her father’s prejudices is implied in Desdemona’s defense of her choice: “I saw Othello’s vis- age in his mind” (1.3.249), not in the superficial coloring of his skin. That the racism is not limited to Brabantio is indicated by the nature of the insults mouthed to him by Iago and Roderigo, and even by the goodhearted Duke who tries to patch up the quarrel between Brabantio and Othello. He says to Brabantio, “If virtue no delighted beauty lack / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.286–87), by which he means that Othello’s virtues outweigh his unfortunate blackness.

Surprisingly, Othello himself seems partially to subscribe to the racist argument that it is unnatural for whites and blacks to marry. Hav- ing been reminded by Iago of Brabantio’s warning that Desdemona had deceived her father and therefore could deceive her husband, Othello echoes Brabantio: “nature erring from itself” (3.3.228) he says of his wife’s accepting him as a husband.

The importance of correctly identifying Othello’s race and recogniz- ing the social attitude toward it is that we can more clearly see the deeply ironic reversal of expectations enacted in this tragedy. By tradi- tion, black was the color ascribed to the devil (hence Emilia’s charge that by murdering Desdemona, Othello has shown himself to be “a

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blacker devil” [5.2.130]). Evil itself was popularly referred to as a black deed. Again, the OED provides full and useful definitions of two figura- tive meanings of the word “black”:

Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister . . . Foul, iniquitous, atrocious, horribly wicked.

But in the play, the “horribly wicked” character is Iago, the white Venetian, and Othello is a great, virtuous man who makes the terrible mistake of supposing his wife to be a criminal deserving execution at the hands of “justice.” The dramatic effect is overwhelming, as we see the viciousness of white Iago overcoming the virtue of black Othello.

Works Cited

“Black,” “Moor.” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. 1971.

“Moor.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1981.

“Moor.” The Random House College Dictionary. Rev. ed. 1980.

Shakespeare, William. Othello, the Moor of Venice. Rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp. Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. 13th ed. Wadsworth, 2017.

Comments This analysis makes use of references from four sources, three diction-

aries and the text of the play, so a Works Cited list is appropriate. The tex- tual material is not presented in the order of its appearance in the play but is instead arranged according to the writer’s thesis. The essay proceeds by defining Othello’s race, then establishing the prevailing attitudes toward it, and finally reaching a conclusion about the effect of reversing racial expectations.

FICTION

The Elements

of Fiction

56

C H A P T E R O N E

Reading the Story

Before embarking on a study of fiction, we might ask a basic question: Why bother to read it? With so many pressing demands on our time, and with so many nonfiction books of history, memoir, politics, and cultural discussion competing for our attention, why should we spend our scarce free time on works of imagination?

The eternal answers to this question are two: enjoyment and understanding.

Since the invention of language, human beings have enjoyed hearing and reading stories, participating in the fictional experiences and adven- tures of imaginary people. The bedtime stories read to children, the thrillers and romances many adults take to the beach, the historical novels and inspirational fiction elderly people often enjoy—any such harmless activ- ity that helps make life less tedious or stressful surely needs nothing else to recommend it. Simple enjoyment has always been a primary aim and justification for reading fiction.

Fiction whose sole purpose is to entertain, however, requires no seri- ous or intensive study. Unless a story expands or refines our thinking on a significant topic or quickens our sense of life, its value is not appreciably greater than that of video games or crossword puzzles. A story written with serious artistic intentions, on the other hand, must yield not only enjoy- ment but also understanding.

Like all serious art, fiction of this latter kind provides an imagined experience that yields authentic insights into some significant aspect of life. “Art is a lie,” Picasso said, “that leads to the truth,” and since a short story is a form of fiction, and thus a kind of “lie,” this statement perfectly sums up the type of story that provides entertainment but also may become part of an enduring literature. Most fiction, of course, is of the other sort: it has no aspirations beyond merely entertaining the reader. In order to distinguish these types of fiction, then, we should begin by defining

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two broad classifications, employing the terms most often used today: commercial fiction, the kind intended solely to entertain; and literary fiction, which is the primary subject of this book.

Commercial fiction, such as the legal thrillers and romance novels that make up best-seller lists and the easy-to-read short stories that appear in mass-market magazines, is written and published primarily to make money, and it makes money because it helps large numbers of people escape the tedium and stress of their lives. Literary fiction, however, is written by someone with serious artistic intentions who hopes to broaden, deepen, and sharpen the reader’s awareness of life. Commercial fiction takes us away from the real world: it helps us temporarily to forget our troubles. Literary fiction plunges us, through the author’s imaginative vision and artistic ability, more deeply into the real world, enabling us to understand life’s difficulties and to empathize with others. Commercial fiction has the reader’s immediate pleasure as its object, but literary fiction hopes to provide a complex, lasting aesthetic and intellectual pleasure rather than a simple, escapist diversion; its object is to offer pleasure plus understanding.

We should immediately make the point that these two categories of fiction are not clear-cut. Not every given story can simply be tossed into one of two bins marked “commercial” or “literary.” Rather, the two catego- ries suggest opposite ends of a spectrum; some works may fall close to the middle rather than to one end, and genres normally associated with com- mercial purposes and categories are sometimes used successfully by authors with literary intentions. A famous work such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for instance, seems to straddle the line between commercial and literary fiction; immensely popular in its own time, it was written with serious intentions but is marred by significant aesthetic flaws. Because it does have some literary quality, however, and because it is a historically important work of its century, it is still read today by general readers and scholars alike. Another example of the occasional blending of our two broad categories is Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), which adheres to certain conventions of the romance novel and has been commercially successful since it was first published, yet it also remains one of the finest literary novels ever written. Similarly, writers such as Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and John Updike have published novels that were simultaneously best sellers and highly praised by literary critics.

The terms commercial and literary should be applied to novels or stories themselves, not necessarily to their authors. Dickens, in fact, is a good example of a single author capable of writing different works that fall into one category or the other. His novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), for instance, had disappointing sales when first published but today is greatly admired and discussed by literary scholars; on the other hand, his

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sentimental but hugely popular A Christmas Carol (1843) is essentially a commercial work. More recently, Graham Greene wrote some novels he subtitled “entertainments” as a way of setting them apart from his more serious, literary novels.

It should likewise be stressed that the differences between commercial and literary fiction do not necessarily relate to the absence or presence of a “moral.” A story whose incidents and characters are notably shallow may have an unimpeachable moral, while a literary story or novel may have no “moral” at all in the conventional sense; it may choose to dramatize human experience rather than to moralize about it. Similarly, the differ- ences between commercial and literary fiction do not lie in the absence or presence of “facts.” A historical romance may be packed with reliable information and yet be pure escape in its depiction of human behavior. Nor do the differences lie in the presence or absence of an element of fantasy. Commercial fiction may have the surface appearance of everyday reality— a police detective novel is a good example—but have little significance beyond the reality depicted; on the other hand, a wildly fanciful tale may impress the reader with a profound and surprising truth. The differences between the two kinds of fiction are deeper and more subtle than any of these distinctions.

Perhaps we can clarify the differences by analogy. Commercial writers are like inventors who devise a contrivance for our diversion. When we push a button, lights flash, bells ring, and cardboard figures move jerkily across a painted horizon. Such writers are full of tricks and surprises: they pull rabbits out of hats, saw beautiful women in two, and juggle brightly colored balls in the air. By contrast, literary writers are more like explorers: they take us out into the midst of life and say, “Look, here is the world in all its complexity.” They also take us behind the scenes, where they show us the props and mirrors and seek to dispel the illusions. This is not to say that literary writers are merely reporters. More surely than commercial writers, they carefully shape their materials. But they shape them always with the intent that we may see, feel, and understand them better, not for the primary purpose of furnishing entertainment. In short, any fiction that illuminates some aspect of human life or behavior with genuine original- ity and power may be called “literary.” Such a story presents an insight— whether large or small—into the nature and condition of our existence. It gives us a keener awareness of our humanity within a universe that is sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile. It helps us to understand our world, our neighbors, and ourselves.

The distinctions we have drawn between the two types of fiction are true of both the full-length novel and the short story. Since the latter form is the focus of this text, however, we should stress that the short story, by

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its very nature, is a more literary genre. Writers hoping to succeed as com- mercial authors usually work in the novel form, which has proved more popular with large masses of people than has the more refined and subtle art of the story. (A collection of short stories appearing on any best-seller list is an extremely rare event.) Although there are types of commercial short stories that appear in men’s adventure magazines, mystery and horror anthologies, and women’s publications, the majority of short fic- tion published today appears in journals that are called, in fact, “literary magazines.” Because of their serious intentions and their brevity, short stories provide the ideal vehicle for studying those elements of storytelling common to all literary fiction.

As you read and reread the stories in this book, you will become aware that the term short story is a highly elastic one. While brevity is an obvi- ous characteristic of the genre, short narratives have always been part of the human storytelling impulse and have shown an impressive diversity through- out history. Ancient fairy tales and fables were the precursors of the modern short story, but only in the last two centuries has the short story assumed the generally accepted characteristics, outlined in the following chapters, which constitute its uniqueness as a literary genre. Authors of short stories con- tinually seek new ways to exploit the genre, however, using fresh techniques and storytelling approaches in order to advance and refine this sophisticated form. A seemingly conventional tale may veer in an unexpected direction; a fragmented structure may help mirror the world of one story, while an experi- mental approach to language or style may distinguish another from anything you have read before. The short story’s lack of commercial appeal has, in a way, helped its development as an art form, for writers of short fiction, uncon- strained by the demands of the marketplace and a mass audience, are able to give free rein to their creativity and imagination. Noting the “freedom and promise of the form,” author Joyce Carol Oates has observed that “radical experimentation, which might be ill-advised in the novel, is well suited for the short story.” This outlook, shared by most literary writers, has helped maintain the status of the short story as a genre capable of ongoing diversity, richness, and self-renewal.

Before beginning a serious study of fiction, you should be aware that literary fiction requires a different way of reading than commercial fiction does. When we take a novel by Stephen King or Danielle Steel to the beach, we do not want to have to think much, if at all, about what we are read- ing; we simply want a diverting way of passing the time. When we read a literary novel or story, however, we are seeking something different. We expect a serious work to offer some of the immediate pleasures of a well-told story—an original premise and intriguing characters, for instance; but we also know that a literary work may be more demanding of the reader in

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terms of its language, structure, and complexity. Ultimately we expect to come away from a literary work with an enhanced understanding of life.

In order to appreciate how it operates as a work of narrative art, we should read any piece of literary fiction at least twice before we can fully grasp what it has to offer. This is another reason the short story represents an ideal medium for the intensive study of fiction, since its length enables us to reread a story without making unreasonable demands on our time. As you read the stories included in this book, try following this general procedure: (1) read the story the first time simply to enjoy and familiar- ize yourself with it; (2) read the story a second time, more slowly and deliberately, in the attempt to understand its full artistic significance and achievement. As you proceed through the chapters, learning about plot, characterization, theme, and so forth, you will gradually develop the instincts of a serious reader: it is important to ask, for instance, why a story is constructed in a certain way, or why an author explores a specific char- acter’s inner life. With commercial fiction, such questions are irrelevant: there the focus is usually on what happens next, not on the techniques the author uses to tell the story. But with literary fiction, we are willing to invest more time and energy into reading more deliberately, and into careful rereading, because we know the personal rewards will be greater.

When we speak of different kinds of reading, of course, we aren’t necessarily talking about different kinds of people. Avid readers may read both commercial and literary fiction at different times, just as an individual may sometimes want fast food, or “junk food,” and at other times be will- ing to invest considerable time and money in savoring a gourmet meal. An English professor may buy a paperback thriller to enjoy during a vacation, while a factory worker might read Jane Eyre during her work breaks. So the primary distinction is between kinds of reading, not kinds of readers.

We also bring different expectations to our reading of these two different types of fiction. When we pick up a commercial novel, we come to the book with specific, fixed expectations and will feel frus- trated and disappointed unless those expectations are met. Depending on the genre, some of these expectations may include (1) a sympathetic hero or heroine—someone with whom the reader can identify and whose adventures and triumphs the reader can share; (2) a defined plot in which something exciting is always happening and in which there is a strong element of suspense (thus the term page-turner, often applied to a successful commercial novel); (3) a happy ending that sends the reader away undisturbed and optimistic about life; (4) a general theme, or “message,” that affirms widely held, conventional views of the world.

By contrast, when we come to a novel or story with literary intentions, we approach the work with a different set of expectations. For one thing,

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we are willing to expect the unexpected: instead of adopting a conventional way of storytelling, a literary author may create a unique style or angle of vision to express his or her artistic truth; and instead of a happy or con- ventional ending in which everything is tied together in a neat package, a literary work may end in an unsettling or even unresolved way, forcing us to examine our own expectations about the story itself, about the way the story is told, and about our ingrained, perhaps unconscious way of viewing a certain topic or idea that may have been challenged or changed by what we have read. In short, when reading literary fiction we must keep an open mind and stay receptive to the author’s imaginative vision, however differ- ent it may be from our own habits of perceiving and “reading” the world.

Reading effectively, it should be stressed, involves evaluating what we read. A typical library contains thousands of books, and any individual has time to read only a fraction of them. To choose our reading wisely, we need to know two things: (1) how to get the most out of any book we read and (2) how to choose the books that will best repay the time and attention we devote to them. The assumption of this book is that a proper selection will include both fiction and nonfiction—nonfiction as an indispensable fund of information and ideas that constitute one kind of knowledge of the world; literary fiction as an equally indispensable source of a different kind of knowledge, a knowledge of experience, felt in the emotions as well as apprehended by the mind. One aim of this book is to help you develop your understanding and judgment in evaluating what you read.

If we approach a literary story in a serious, committed way, after all, we will probably have a more memorable and satisfying reading experi- ence than the kind we derive from commercial fiction, which we tend to forget as soon as we have consumed it. Especially if you are accustomed to reading fiction quickly and without much thought about its possible complex meanings, try to adopt a slower, more thoughtful approach as you read the stories in this and later chapters. Inevitably, as with dif- ferent commercial works, you will find some of the stories in this book more appealing than others. They have been chosen carefully, however, to help you explore the elements of fiction and to illustrate the diversity of the short-story form as practiced by a broad range of writers. Ideally, a careful reading of these stories will convince you that although nonfic- tion may be an indispensable fund of information and ideas, and one way of knowing about the world, fiction is an equally indispensable source of knowledge, and a knowledge apprehended not only by your intellect but by your emotions and imagination as well. Through the act of reading a story and sharing an author’s imaginative vision, you will gain not only a pleasurable experience but growth in your understanding of the world and of the human condition.

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RICHARD CONNELL

The Most Dangerous Game “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 sug-

gestive 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 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.”

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the most dangerous game First published in 1924. Richard Connell (1893–1949) was a native of New York State, graduated from Harvard, and served a year in France with the United States Army during World War I.

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R O N E

1. Differentiate between commercial fiction and literary fiction. 2. Explain the purposes of literary fiction. 3. Review the different types of short stories. 4. Describe the best way to read a short story for the purpose of

serious study. 5. List the differing expectations we bring to the reading of commercial

and literary fiction.

CONNELL / THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME 63

“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 the 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—”

“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 on the after deck.”

“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 muf-

fled 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 favor- ite 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—”

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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, some one 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 bal- anced 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 closed 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 cool-headedness 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 some one 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.

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 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

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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 for- bidding 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 had 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, glit- tering 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 direc- tion 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 he 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 château; 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 about it all hung an air of unreality.

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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 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 dis- cerned 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 pointed 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 uni- form, 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 pre- cision 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 hand-

some; 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 cheek bones, a sharp-cut 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.”

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“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 table where twoscore men could sit down to eat. About the hall were the 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 appointments 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.”

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“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 cigaret case and offered his guest a long black cigaret 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, Mr. Rainsford?”

“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. 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 cigaret.

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“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 tea room in Monte Carlo or drive a taxi in Paris. Naturally, I continued to hunt—grizzlies 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 disap- pointed. 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 ‘a 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 cigaret. “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

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I do my hunting. The island is perfect for my purposes—there are jungles with a maze of trails 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.”

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: ‘it 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? Good God, 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 snuff-box 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 need 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—lascars,° blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels—a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them.”

“But they are men,” said Rainsford hotly.

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“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.”

“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 righ- teous 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 cel-

lar. 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°

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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 win-

dows 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 Bergère.

“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 at all 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.”

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 château 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

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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 fault- lessly 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 Crêpes 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 enthusias-

tically. “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 defeated 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.”

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The general read what Rainsford was thinking. “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 hunt-

ing 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 clear-headed when the château gates snapped shut behind him. His whole idea at first was to put distance between him- self and General Zaroff, and, to this end, he had plunged along, spurred on by the sharp rowels 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 paths 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

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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 nearby, 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 zeal- ous 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, com- ing 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 tapes- try, he watched. The thing that was approaching was a man.

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 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 cigarets; its pungent incense-like 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

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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 precari- ously 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 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 shoul- der, 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 the sound of my voice, as I suppose you are, let me congratulate you. Not many men know how to make a Malay man-catcher. 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.”

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 in 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 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.

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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 at 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 cigaret. It seemed to Rainsford that the general was coming with unusual swiftness; he was not feeling his way along, foot by foot. Rainsford, crouch- ing 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, I’ll 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 the 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 tied back the sapling. Then he ran for his life. The hounds

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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 shinnied 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.

“Nerve, nerve, nerve!” he panted, as he dashed along. A blue gap showed between the trees dead ahead. Ever nearer drew the hounds. Rains- ford 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 château. 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 he sat down, took a drink of brandy from a silver flask, lit a perfumed cigaret, 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 enjoy- ment. 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.”

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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.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Discuss the two meanings of the title. 2. How important is suspense in the story? How is it developed and sustained?

What roles do chance and coincidence play in the story? 3. Discuss the characterizations of Rainsford and General Zaroff. Which one is

more fully characterized? Are both characters plausible? 4. Why does Connell include the “philosophical” discussion between Whitney and

Rainsford at the beginning of the story (paragraphs 7–24)? Does it reveal a per- sonal limitation on Rainsford’s part? Does Rainsford undergo any significant changes in the course of the story? Do we come to know him better as the story proceeds?

5. Compare the discussion between Whitney and Rainsford and the after-dinner conversation between Rainsford and Zaroff (paragraphs 68–145). In these discussions, is Rainsford more like Whitney or Zaroff? How does he differ from Zaroff? Does the end of the story resolve that difference?

6. As you read the story, do you develop any expectations of how it might be resolved? Are these expectations met or overturned?

7. As you go through the story a second time, do you find more significance in any of the action or description than you noticed during the first reading?

8. Would you describe this story as commercial fiction or literary fiction? Support your answer.

TOBIAS WOLFF

Hunters in the Snow Tub had been waiting for an hour in the falling snow. He paced the

sidewalk to keep warm and stuck his head out over the curb whenever he saw lights approaching. One driver stopped for him but before Tub could wave the man on he saw the rifle on Tub’s back and hit the gas. The tires spun on the ice.

The fall of snow thickened. Tub stood below the overhang of a build- ing. Across the road the clouds whitened just above the rooftops, and the street lights went out. He shifted the rifle strap to his other shoulder. The whiteness seeped up the sky.

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hunters in the snow First published in 1981. Tobias Wolff (b. 1945), a winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, has also won many awards for his short fiction, including places in the annual Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories volumes. Raised in the state of Washington, he dropped out of high school and worked as an apprentice seaman, then later served as a paratrooper in Vietnam. He then earned degrees at Oxford University and Stanford, where he now teaches.

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A truck slid around the corner, horn blaring, rear end sashaying. Tub moved to the sidewalk and held up his hand. The truck jumped the curb and kept coming, half on the street and half on the sidewalk. It wasn’t slowing down at all. Tub stood for a moment, still holding up his hand, then jumped back. His rifle slipped off his shoulder and clattered on the ice, a sandwich fell out of his pocket. He ran for the steps of the building. Another sandwich and a package of cookies tumbled onto the new snow. He made the steps and looked back.

The truck had stopped several feet beyond where Tub had been stand- ing. He picked up his sandwiches and his cookies and slung the rifle and went up to the driver’s window. The driver was bent against the steer- ing wheel, slapping his knees and drumming his feet on the floorboards. He looked like a cartoon of a person laughing, except that his eyes watched the man on the seat beside him. “You ought to see yourself,” the driver said. “He looks just like a beach ball with a hat on, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, Frank?”

The man beside him smiled and looked off. “You almost ran me down,” Tub said. “You could’ve killed me.” “Come on, Tub,” said the man beside the driver. “Be mellow. Kenny

was just messing around.” He opened the door and slid over to the middle of the seat.

Tub took the bolt out of his rifle and climbed in beside him. “I waited an hour,” he said. “If you meant ten o’clock why didn’t you say ten o’clock?”

“Tub, you haven’t done anything but complain since we got here,” said the man in the middle. “If you want to piss and moan all day you might as well go home and bitch at your kids. Take your pick.” When Tub didn’t say anything he turned to the driver. “Okay, Kenny, let’s hit the road.”

Some juvenile delinquents had heaved a brick through the windshield on the driver’s side, so the cold and snow tunneled right into the cab. The heater didn’t work. They covered themselves with a couple of blankets Kenny had brought along and pulled down the muffs on their caps. Tub tried to keep his hands warm by rubbing them under the blanket but Frank made him stop.

They left Spokane and drove deep into the country, running along black lines of fences. The snow let up, but still there was no edge to the land where it met the sky. Nothing moved in the chalky fields. The cold bleached their faces and made the stubble stand out on their cheeks and along their upper lips. They stopped twice for coffee before they got to the woods where Kenny wanted to hunt.

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Tub was for trying someplace different; two years in a row they’d been up and down this land and hadn’t seen a thing. Frank didn’t care one way or the other, he just wanted to get out of the goddamned truck. “Feel that,” Frank said, slamming the door. He spread his feet and closed his eyes and leaned his head way back and breathed deeply. “Tune in on that energy.”

“Another thing,” Kenny said. “This is open land. Most of the land around here is posted.”

“I’m cold,” Tub said. Frank breathed out. “Stop bitching, Tub. Get centered.” “I wasn’t bitching.” “Centered,” Kenny said. “Next thing you’ll be wearing a nightgown,

Frank. Selling flowers out at the airport.” “Kenny,” Frank said, “you talk too much.” “Okay,” Kenny said. “I won’t say a word. Like I won’t say anything

about a certain babysitter.” “What babysitter?” Tub asked. “That’s between us,” Frank said, looking at Kenny. “That’s confiden-

tial. You keep your mouth shut.” Kenny laughed. “You’re asking for it,” Frank said. “Asking for what?” “You’ll see.” “Hey,” Tub said, “are we hunting or what?” They started off across the field. Tub had trouble getting through the

fences. Frank and Kenny could have helped him; they could have lifted up on the top wire and stepped on the bottom wire, but they didn’t. They stood and watched him. There were a lot of fences and Tub was puffing when they reached the woods.

They hunted for over two hours and saw no deer, no tracks, no sign. Finally they stopped by the creek to eat. Kenny had several slices of pizza and a couple of candy bars; Frank had a sandwich, an apple, two carrots, and a square of chocolate; Tub ate one hard-boiled egg and a stick of celery.

“You ask me how I want to die today,” Kenny said, “I’ll tell you burn me at the stake.” He turned to Tub. “You still on that diet?” He winked at Frank.

“What do you think? You think I like hard-boiled eggs?” “All I can say is, it’s the first diet I ever heard of where you gained

weight from it.” “Who said I gained weight?” “Oh, pardon me. I take it back. You’re just wasting away before my

very eyes. Isn’t he, Frank?”

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Frank had his fingers fanned out, tips against the bark of the stump where he’d laid his food. His knuckles were hairy. He wore a heavy wed- ding band and on his right pinky another gold ring with a flat face and an “F” in what looked like diamonds. He turned the ring this way and that. “Tub,” he said, “you haven’t seen your own balls in ten years.”

Kenny doubled over laughing. He took off his hat and slapped his leg with it.

“What am I supposed to do?” Tub said. “It’s my glands.”

They left the woods and hunted along the creek. Frank and Kenny worked one bank and Tub worked the other, moving upstream. The snow was light but the drifts were deep and hard to move through. Wherever Tub looked the surface was smooth, undisturbed, and after a time he lost interest. He stopped looking for tracks and just tried to keep up with Frank and Kenny on the other side. A moment came when he realized he hadn’t seen them in a long time. The breeze was moving from him to them; when it stilled he could sometimes hear Kenny laughing but that was all. He quickened his pace, breasting hard into the drifts, fighting away the snow with his knees and elbows. He heard his heart and felt the flush on his face but he never once stopped.

Tub caught up with Frank and Kenny at a bend of the creek. They were standing on a log that stretched from their bank to his. Ice had backed up behind the log. Frozen reeds stuck out, barely nodding when the air moved.

“See anything?” Frank asked. Tub shook his head. There wasn’t much daylight left and they decided to head back toward

the road. Frank and Kenny crossed the log and they started downstream, using the trail Tub had broken. Before they had gone very far Kenny stopped. “Look at that,” he said, and pointed to some tracks going from the creek back into the woods. Tub’s footprints crossed right over them. There on the bank, plain as day, were several mounds of deer sign. “What do you think that is, Tub?” Kenny kicked at it. “Walnuts on vanilla icing?”

“I guess I didn’t notice.” Kenny looked at Frank. “I was lost.” “You were lost. Big deal.” They followed the tracks into the woods. The deer had gone over a

fence half buried in drifting snow. A no hunting sign was nailed to the top of one of the posts. Frank laughed and said the son of a bitch could read. Kenny wanted to go after him but Frank said no way, the people out here didn’t mess around. He thought maybe the farmer who owned the land would let them use it if they asked. Kenny wasn’t so sure. Anyway, he

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figured that by the time they walked to the truck and drove up the road and doubled back it would be almost dark.

“Relax,” Frank said. “You can’t hurry nature. If we’re meant to get that deer, we’ll get it. If we’re not, we won’t.”

They started back toward the truck. This part of the woods was mainly pine. The snow was shaded and had a glaze on it. It held up Kenny and Frank but Tub kept falling through. As he kicked forward, the edge of the crust bruised his shins. Kenny and Frank pulled ahead of him, to where he couldn’t even hear their voices any more. He sat down on a stump and wiped his face. He ate both the sandwiches and half the cookies, taking his own sweet time. It was dead quiet.

When Tub crossed the last fence into the road the truck started mov- ing. Tub had to run for it and just managed to grab hold of the tailgate and hoist himself into the bed. He lay there, panting. Kenny looked out the rear window and grinned. Tub crawled into the lee of the cab to get out of the freezing wind. He pulled his earflaps low and pushed his chin into the collar of his coat. Someone rapped on the window but Tub would not turn around.

He and Frank waited outside while Kenny went into the farmhouse to ask permission. The house was old and paint was curling off the sides. The smoke streamed westward off the top of the chimney, fanning away into a thin gray plume. Above the ridge of the hills another ridge of blue clouds was rising.

“You’ve got a short memory,” Tub said. “What?” Frank said. He had been staring off. “I used to stick up for you.” “Okay, so you used to stick up for me. What’s eating you?” “You shouldn’t have just left me back there like that.” “You’re a grown-up, Tub. You can take care of yourself. Anyway, if you

think you’re the only person with problems I can tell you that you’re not.” “Is something bothering you, Frank?” Frank kicked at a branch poking out of the snow. “Never mind,”

he said. “What did Kenny mean about the babysitter?” “Kenny talks too much,” Frank said. “You just mind your own

business.” Kenny came out of the farmhouse and gave the thumbs-up and they

began walking back toward the woods. As they passed the barn a large black hound with a grizzled snout ran out and barked at them. Every time he barked he slid backwards a bit, like a cannon recoiling. Kenny got down on all fours and snarled and barked back at him, and the dog slunk away into the barn, looking over his shoulder and peeing a little as he went.

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“That’s an old-timer,” Frank said. “A real graybeard. Fifteen years if he’s a day.”

“Too old,” Kenny said. Past the barn they cut off through the fields. The land was unfenced

and the crust was freezing up thick and they made good time. They kept to the edge of the field until they picked up the tracks again and followed them into the woods, farther and farther back toward the hills. The trees started to blur with the shadows and the wind rose and needled their faces with the crystals it swept off the glaze. Finally they lost the tracks.

Kenny swore and threw down his hat. “This is the worst day of hunt- ing I ever had, bar none.” He picked up his hat and brushed off the snow. “This will be the first season since I was fifteen I haven’t got my deer.”

“It isn’t the deer,” Frank said. “It’s the hunting. There are all these forces out here and you just have to go with them.”

“You go with them,” Kenny said. “I came out here to get me a deer, not listen to a bunch of hippie bullshit. And if it hadn’t been for dimples here I would have, too.”

“That’s enough,” Frank said. “And you—you’re so busy thinking about that little jailbait of yours

you wouldn’t know a deer if you saw one.” “Drop dead,” Frank said, and turned away. Kenny and Tub followed him back across the fields. When they were

coming up to the barn Kenny stopped and pointed. “I hate that post,” he said. He raised his rifle and fired. It sounded like a dry branch crack- ing. The post splintered along its right side, up towards the top. “There,” Kenny said. “It’s dead.”

“Knock it off,” Frank said, walking ahead. Kenny looked at Tub. He smiled. “I hate that tree,” he said, and

fired again. Tub hurried to catch up with Frank. He started to speak but just then the dog ran out of the barn and barked at them. “Easy, boy,” Frank said.

“I hate that dog.” Kenny was behind them. “That’s enough,” Frank said. “You put that gun down.” Kenny fired. The bullet went in between the dog’s eyes. He sank right

down into the snow, his legs splayed out on each side, his yellow eyes open and staring. Except for the blood he looked like a small bearskin rug. The blood ran down the dog’s muzzle into the snow.

They all looked at the dog lying there. “What did he ever do to you?” Tub asked. “He was just barking.” Kenny turned to Tub. “I hate you.” Tub shot from the waist. Kenny jerked backward against the fence and

buckled to his knees. He folded his hands across his stomach. “Look,” he said.

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His hands were covered with blood. In the dusk his blood was more blue than red. It seemed to belong to the shadows. It didn’t seem out of place. Kenny eased himself onto his back. He sighed several times, deeply. “You shot me,” he said.

“I had to,” Tub said. He knelt beside Kenny. “Oh God,” he said. “Frank. Frank.”

Frank hadn’t moved since Kenny killed the dog. “Frank!” Tub shouted. “I was just kidding around,” Kenny said. “It was a joke. Oh!” he said,

and arched his back suddenly. “Oh!” he said again, and dug his heels into the snow and pushed himself along on his head for several feet. Then he stopped and lay there, rocking back and forth on his heels and head like a wrestler doing warm-up exercises.

Frank roused himself. “Kenny,” he said. He bent down and put his gloved hand on Kenny’s brow. “You shot him,” he said to Tub.

“He made me,” Tub said. “No no no,” Kenny said. Tub was weeping from the eyes and nostrils. His whole face was wet.

Frank closed his eyes, then looked down at Kenny again. “Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere,” Kenny said, “just everywhere.” “Oh God,” Tub said. “I mean where did it go in?” Frank said. “Here.” Kenny pointed at the wound in his stomach. It was welling

slowly with blood. “You’re lucky,” Frank said. “It’s on the left side. It missed your appen-

dix. If it had hit your appendix you’d really be in the soup.” He turned and threw up onto the snow, holding his sides as if to keep warm.

“Are you all right?” Tub said. “There’s some aspirin in the truck,” Kenny said. “I’m all right,” Frank said. “We’d better call an ambulance,” Tub said. “Jesus,” Frank said. “What are we going to say?” “Exactly what happened,” Tub said. “He was going to shoot me but I

shot him first.” “No sir!” Kenny said. “I wasn’t either!” Frank patted Kenny on the arm. “Easy does it, partner.” He stood.

“Let’s go.” Tub picked up Kenny’s rifle as they walked down toward the farm-

house. “No sense leaving this around,” he said. “Kenny might get ideas.” “I can tell you one thing,” Frank said. “You’ve really done it this time.

This definitely takes the cake.”

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They had to knock on the door twice before it was opened by a thin man with lank hair. The room behind him was filled with smoke. He squinted at them. “You get anything?” he asked.

“No,” Frank said. “I knew you wouldn’t. That’s what I told the other fellow.” “We’ve had an accident.” The man looked past Frank and Tub into the gloom. “Shoot your

friend, did you?” Frank nodded. “I did,” Tub said. “I suppose you want to use the phone.” “If it’s okay.” The man in the door looked behind him, then stepped back. Frank

and Tub followed him into the house. There was a woman sitting by the stove in the middle of the room. The stove was smoking badly. She looked up and then down again at the child asleep in her lap. Her face was white and damp; strands of hair were pasted across her forehead. Tub warmed his hands over the stove while Frank went into the kitchen to call. The man who had let them in stood at the window, his hands in his pockets.

“My friend shot your dog,” Tub said. The man nodded without turning around. “I should have done it

myself. I just couldn’t.” “He loved that dog so much,” the woman said. The child squirmed

and she rocked it. “You asked him to?” Tub said. “You asked him to shoot your dog?” “He was old and sick. Couldn’t chew his food any more. I would have

done it myself but I don’t have a gun.” “You couldn’t have anyway,” the woman said. “Never in a million

years.” The man shrugged. Frank came out of the kitchen. “We’ll have to take him ourselves. The

nearest hospital is fifty miles from here and all their ambulances are out anyway.”

The woman knew a shortcut but the directions were complicated and Tub had to write them down. The man told them where they could find some boards to carry Kenny on. He didn’t have a flashlight but he said he would leave the porch light on.

It was dark outside. The clouds were low and heavy-looking and the wind blew in shrill gusts. There was a screen loose on the house and it banged slowly and then quickly as the wind rose again. They could hear it all the way to the barn. Frank went for the boards while Tub looked for

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Kenny, who was not where they had left him. Tub found him farther up the drive, lying on his stomach. “You okay?” Tub said.

“It hurts.” “Frank says it missed your appendix.” “I already had my appendix out.” “All right,” Frank said, coming up to them. “We’ll have you in a nice

warm bed before you can say Jack Robinson.” He put the two boards on Kenny’s right side.

“Just as long as I don’t have one of those male nurses,” Kenny said. “Ha ha,” Frank said. “That’s the spirit. Get ready, set, over you go,”

and he rolled Kenny onto the boards. Kenny screamed and kicked his legs in the air. When he quieted down Frank and Tub lifted the boards and carried him down the drive. Tub had the back end, and with the snow blowing into his face he had trouble with his footing. Also he was tired and the man inside had forgotten to turn the porch light on. Just past the house Tub slipped and threw out his hands to catch himself. The boards fell and Kenny tumbled out and rolled to the bottom of the drive, yelling all the way. He came to rest against the right front wheel of the truck.

“You fat moron,” Frank said. “You aren’t good for diddly.” Tub grabbed Frank by the collar and backed him hard up against the

fence. Frank tried to pull his hands away but Tub shook him and snapped his head back and forth and finally Frank gave up.

“What do you know about fat,” Tub said. “What do you know about glands.” As he spoke he kept shaking Frank. “What do you know about me.”

“All right,” Frank said. “No more,” Tub said. “All right.” “No more talking to me like that. No more watching. No more

laughing.” “Okay, Tub. I promise.” Tub let go of Frank and leaned his forehead against the fence. His arms

hung straight at his sides. “I’m sorry, Tub.” Frank touched him on the shoulder. “I’ll be down at

the truck.” Tub stood by the fence for a while and then got the rifles off the

porch. Frank had rolled Kenny back onto the boards and they lifted him into the bed of the truck. Frank spread the seat blankets over him. “Warm enough?” he asked.

Kenny nodded. “Okay. Now how does reverse work on this thing?”

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“All the way to the left and up.” Kenny sat up as Frank started forward to the cab. “Frank!”

“What?” “If it sticks don’t force it.” The truck started right away. “One thing,” Frank said, “you’ve got

to hand it to the Japanese. A very ancient, very spiritual culture and they can still make a hell of a truck.” He glanced over at Tub. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you felt that way, honest to God I didn’t. You should have said something.”

“I did.” “When? Name one time.” “A couple of hours ago.” “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.” “That’s true, Frank,” Tub said. “You don’t pay attention very much.” “Tub,” Frank said, “what happened back there, I should have been

more sympathetic. I realize that. You were going through a lot. I just want you to know it wasn’t your fault. He was asking for it.”

“You think so?” “Absolutely. It was him or you. I would have done the same thing in

your shoes, no question.” The wind was blowing into their faces. The snow was a moving white

wall in front of their lights; it swirled into the cab through the hole in the windshield and settled on them. Tub clapped his hands and shifted around to stay warm, but it didn’t work.

“I’m going to have to stop,” Frank said. “I can’t feel my fingers.” Up ahead they saw some lights off the road. It was a tavern. Outside

in the parking lot there were several jeeps and trucks. A couple of them had deer strapped across their hoods. Frank parked and they went back to Kenny. “How you doing, partner,” Frank said.

“I’m cold.” “Well, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. It’s worse inside, take my word

for it. You should get that windshield fixed.” “Look,” Tub said, “he threw the blankets off.” They were lying in a

heap against the tailgate. “Now look, Kenny,” Frank said, “it’s no use whining about being cold

if you’re not going to try and keep warm. You’ve got to do your share.” He spread the blankets over Kenny and tucked them in at the corners.

“They blew off.” “Hold on to them then.” “Why are we stopping, Frank?” “Because if me and Tub don’t get warmed up we’re going to freeze

solid and then where will you be?” He punched Kenny lightly in the arm. “So just hold your horses.”

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The bar was full of men in colored jackets, mostly orange. The waitress brought coffee. “Just what the doctor ordered,” Frank said, cradling the steaming cup in his hand. His skin was bone white. “Tub, I’ve been think- ing. What you said about me not paying attention, that’s true.”

“It’s okay.” “No. I really had that coming. I guess I’ve just been a little too interested

in old number one. I’ve had a lot on my mind. Not that that’s any excuse.” “Forget it, Frank. I sort of lost my temper back there. I guess we’re all

a little on edge.” Frank shook his head. “It isn’t just that.” “You want to talk about it?” “Just between us, Tub?” “Sure, Frank. Just between us.” “Tub, I think I’m going to be leaving Nancy.” “Oh, Frank. Oh, Frank.” Tub sat back and shook his head. Frank reached out and laid his hand on Tub’s arm. “Tub, have you ever

been really in love?” “Well—” “I mean really in love.” He squeezed Tub’s wrist. “With your whole

being.” “I don’t know. When you put it like that, I don’t know.” “You haven’t then. Nothing against you, but you’d know it if you

had.” Frank let go of Tub’s arm. “This isn’t just some bit of fluff I’m talk- ing about.”

“Who is she, Frank?” Frank paused. He looked into his empty cup. “Roxanne Brewer.” “Cliff Brewer’s kid? The babysitter?” “You can’t just put people into categories like that, Tub. That’s why

the whole system is wrong. And that’s why this country is going to hell in a rowboat.”

“But she can’t be more than—” Tub shook his head. “Fifteen. She’ll be sixteen in May.” Frank smiled. “May fourth, three

twenty-seven p.m. Hell, Tub, a hundred years ago she’d have been an old maid by that age. Juliet was only thirteen.”

“Juliet? Juliet Miller? Jesus, Frank, she doesn’t even have breasts. She doesn’t even wear a top to her bathing suit. She’s still collecting frogs.”

“Not Juliet Miller. The real Juliet. Tub, don’t you see how you’re dividing people up into categories? He’s an executive, she’s a secretary, he’s a truck driver, she’s fifteen years old. Tub, this so-called babysitter, this so-called fifteen-year-old has more in her little finger than most of us have in our entire bodies. I can tell you this little lady is something special.”

Tub nodded. “I know the kids like her.” “She’s opened up whole worlds to me that I never knew were there.”

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“What does Nancy think about all of this?” “She doesn’t know.” “You haven’t told her?” “Not yet. It’s not so easy. She’s been damned good to me all these years.

Then there’s the kids to consider.” The brightness in Frank’s eyes trembled and he wiped quickly at them with the back of his hand. “I guess you think I’m a complete bastard.”

“No, Frank. I don’t think that.” “Well, you ought to.” “Frank, when you’ve got a friend it means you’ve always got someone

on your side, no matter what. That’s the way I feel about it, anyway.” “You mean that, Tub?” “Sure I do.” Frank smiled. “You don’t know how good it feels to hear you say that.”

Kenny had tried to get out of the truck but he hadn’t made it. He was jackknifed over the tailgate, his head hanging above the bumper. They lifted him back into the bed and covered him again. He was sweating and his teeth chattered. “It hurts, Frank.”

“It wouldn’t hurt so much if you just stayed put. Now we’re going to the hospital. Got that? Say it—I’m going to the hospital.”

“I’m going to the hospital.” “Again.” “I’m going to the hospital.” “Now just keep saying that to yourself and before you know it we’ll

be there.” After they had gone a few miles Tub turned to Frank. “I just pulled a

real boner,” he said. “What’s that?” “I left the directions on the table back there.” “That’s okay. I remember them pretty well.” The snowfall lightened and the clouds began to roll back off the fields,

but it was no warmer and after a time both Frank and Tub were bitten through and shaking. Frank almost didn’t make it around a curve, and they decided to stop at the next roadhouse.

There was an automatic hand-dryer in the bathroom and they took turns standing in front of it, opening their jackets and shirts and letting the jet of hot air breathe across their faces and chests.

“You know,” Tub said, “what you told me back there, I appreciate it. Trusting me.”

Frank opened and closed his fingers in front of the nozzle. “The way I look at it, Tub, no man is an island. You’ve got to trust someone.”

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“Frank—” Frank waited. “When I said that about my glands, that wasn’t true. The truth is I

just shovel it in.” “Well, Tub—” “Day and night, Frank. In the shower. On the freeway.” He turned

and let the air play over his back. “I’ve even got stuff in the paper towel machine at work.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your glands at all?” Frank had taken his boots and socks off. He held first his right, then his left foot up to the nozzle.

“No. There never was.” “Does Alice know?” The machine went off and Frank started lacing

up his boots. “Nobody knows. That’s the worst of it, Frank. Not the being fat, I never

got any big kick out of being thin, but the lying. Having to lead a double life like a spy or a hit man. This sounds strange but I feel sorry for those guys, I really do. I know what they go through. Always having to think about what you say and do. Always feeling like people are watching you, trying to catch you at something. Never able to just be yourself. Like when I make a big deal about only having an orange for breakfast and then scarf all the way to work. Oreos, Mars Bars, Twinkies. Sugar Babies. Snickers.” Tub glanced at Frank and looked quickly away. “Pretty disgusting, isn’t it?”

“Tub. Tub.” Frank shook his head. “Come on.” He took Tub’s arm and led him into the restaurant half of the bar. “My friend is hungry,” he told the waitress. “Bring four orders of pancakes, plenty of butter and syrup.”

“Frank—” “Sit down.” When the dishes came Frank carved out slabs of butter and just laid

them on the pancakes. Then he emptied the bottle of syrup, moving it back and forth over the plates. He leaned forward on his elbows and rested his chin in one hand. “Go on, Tub.”

Tub ate several mouthfuls, then started to wipe his lips. Frank took the napkin away from him. “No wiping,” he said. Tub kept at it. The syrup covered his chin; it dripped to a point like a goatee. “Weigh in, Tub,” Frank said, pushing another fork across the table. “Get down to business.” Tub took the fork in his left hand and lowered his head and started really chowing down. “Clean your plate,” Frank said when the pancakes were gone, and Tub lifted each of the four plates and licked it clean. He sat back, trying to catch his breath.

“Beautiful,” Frank said. “Are you full?” “I’m full,” Tub said. “I’ve never been so full.”

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Kenny’s blankets were bunched up against the tailgate again. “They must have blown off,” Tub said. “They’re not doing him any good,” Frank said. “We might as well get

some use out of them.” Kenny mumbled. Tub bent over him. “What? Speak up.” “I’m going to the hospital,” Kenny said. “Attaboy,” Frank said. The blankets helped. The wind still got their faces and Frank’s hands

but it was much better. The fresh snow on the road and the trees sparkled under the beam of the headlight. Squares of light from farmhouse windows fell onto the blue snow in the fields.

“Frank,” Tub said after a time, “you know that farmer? He told Kenny to kill the dog.”

“You’re kidding!” Frank leaned forward, considering. “That Kenny. What a card.” He laughed and so did Tub. Tub smiled out the back win- dow. Kenny lay with his arms folded over his stomach, moving his lips at the stars. Right overhead was the Big Dipper, and behind, hanging between Kenny’s toes in the direction of the hospital, was the North Star, Pole Star, Help to Sailors. As the truck twisted through the gentle hills the star went back and forth between Kenny’s boots, staying always in his sight. “I’m going to the hospital,” Kenny said. But he was wrong. They had taken a different turn a long way back.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Discuss the way Tub is presented in the opening scene. Does your assessment of his character change in the later scenes?

2. How does the cold, hostile environment in the story relate to its meaning? 3. Which is the most sympathetic of the three characters? The story deals, in part,

with the power struggle among the characters. Which character is the most powerful? Do the balance of power and alliances between the characters shift as the story proceeds?

4. How do the physical descriptions of the characters help us understand them? For example, how is Tub’s obesity relevant to his character?

5. The second half of the story includes some surprising twists and turns. How are these more meaningful and substantial than the random plot twists one might find in a purely commercial work of fiction?

6. What other elements of the story suggest that this is a serious, literary work rather than merely an entertaining yarn about three hapless hunters?

7. What is the purpose of the scene in which Frank and Tub stop at the tavern for food and coffee, leaving the wounded Kenny in the back of the truck? During their conversation, Frank analyzes his own character and expresses remorse. Are his insights and remorse genuine? Why or why not?

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8. The final plot twist comes in the last two sentences of the story. Here the narra- tor speaks directly to the reader, giving us information the characters don’t know. How is this an appropriate conclusion to the story? What final statement is being made about the characters?

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. After reviewing the distinguishing characteristics of literary and commercial fiction, and bearing in mind that the two types of fiction represent a spectrum of qualities rather than hard-and-fast opposites, examine one of the following stories for its mix of literary and commercial characteristics:

a. Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited” (page 199). b. Hurston, “Sweat” (page 583). c. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (page 675). d. Maupassant, “The Necklace” (page 369).

On balance, determine whether your choice is predominantly commercial or literary.

2. Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” and Wolff ’s “Hunters in the Snow” both deal with the “sport” of hunting. In a comparative essay, determine which is the literary and which is the commercial story.

94 CHAPTER ONE / READING THE STORY

UNDERSTANDING AND EVALUATING FICTION

Most of the stories in this book are accompanied by study questions that are by no means exhaustive. The following is a list of questions that you may apply to any story. You may be unable to answer many of them until you have read further in the book.

Plot and Structure

1. Who is the protagonist of the story? What are the conflicts? Are they physical, intellectual, moral, or emotional? Is the main conflict between sharply differentiated good and evil, or is it more subtle and complex?

2. 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?

3. 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?

4. 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?

5. 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?

6. To what extent is this a “formula” story?

Characterization

7. What means does the author use to reveal character? Are the characters sufficiently dramatized? What use is made of character contrasts?

8. Are the characters consistent in their actions? Adequately motivated? Plausible? Does the author successfully avoid stock characters?

9. Is each character fully enough developed to justify its role in the story? Are the main characters round or flat?

10. Is 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

11. Does the story have a theme? What is it? Is it implicit or explicit? 12. Does the theme reinforce or oppose popular notions of life?

Does it furnish a new insight or refresh or deepen an old one?

Point of View

13. 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?

14. What advantages does the chosen point of view have? Does it furnish any clues as to the purpose of the story?

15. If the point of view is that of one of the characters, does this character have any limitations that affect her or his interpretation of events or persons?

16. Does the author use point of view primarily to reveal or conceal? Is important information known to the central character ever unfairly withheld?

Symbol, Allegory, and Fantasy

17. Does the story make use of symbols? If so, do the symbols carry or merely reinforce the meaning of the story?

18. Does the story make use of symbolic settings? 19. Does the story employ allegory? Is the use of allegory clear-cut or

ambiguous? 20. Does the story contain any elements of fantasy? If so, what is

the initial assumption? Does the story operate logically from this assumption?

21. Is the fantasy employed for its own sake or to express some human truth? If the latter, what truth?

Humor and Irony

22. If the story employs humor, is the humor present merely for its own sake or does it contribute to the meaning?

23. Does the story anywhere use irony of situation? Dramatic irony? Verbal irony? What functions do the ironies serve?

General

24. Is the primary interest of the story in plot, character, theme, or some other element?

UNDERSTANDING AND EVALUATING FICTION 95

96 CHAPTER ONE / READING THE STORY

25. What contribution to the story is made by its setting? Is the particular setting essential, or could the story have happened anywhere?

26. What are the characteristics of the author’s style? Are they appro- priate to the nature of the story?

27. What light is thrown on the story by its title? 28. Do all the elements of the story work together to support a

central purpose? Is any part irrelevant or inappropriate? 29. What do you conceive to be the story’s central purpose? How

fully has it achieved that purpose? 30. Is the story commercial or literary? How significant is the story’s

purpose? 31. Is the story more or less impressive on a second reading?

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C H A P T E R T WO

Plot and Structure

Plot is the sequence of incidents or events through which an author constructs a story; skilled authors are careful to present the sequence in a significant order. When described in isolation, the plot bears about the same relationship to a story that a map does to a journey. Just as a map may be drawn on a finer or grosser scale, so may a plot be recounted with lesser or greater detail. A plot summary may include what characters say or think, as well as what they do, but it leaves out description and analysis and concentrates primarily on major events.

Plot should not be confused with the content of the work. The plot is not the action itself; rather, it is the way the author arranges the action toward a specific end. In commercial fiction, the plot may include many surprising twists and turns and a culminating, climactic incident; because the main goal is to keep the reader turning the pages, a commercial author is likely to use a tried-and-true, fairly conventional structure in arranging the plot elements. The story may follow a standard chronology, for instance, and may employ familiar structural patterns. Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” has a chronological structure and includes the familiar structural tactic (one as old as the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears) of using a three-part sequence in narrating Rainsford’s attempts to entrap General Zaroff: first he tries the Malay man-catcher, and fails; then he tries the Burmese tiger pit, and fails; but on the third try, with the “native trick” learned in Uganda, he manages to kill Ivan and ultimately outwit Zaroff.

Although Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow” also employs a chronological structure, the plot elements are arranged in a complex way in order to explore the relationships among the three principal characters. Compared with “The Most Dangerous Game,” the plot structure in “Hunters in the Snow” is more experimental and unpredictable, taking unexpected excursions into the thought processes of all three characters. For a literary writer, a complex structure is often required to convey complex meanings. In Wolff’s story, the

98 FICTION / THE ELEMENTS OF FICTION

significance of the action is more important than the action itself, and subtle exchanges of words among characters may be just as significant as the more action-oriented sequences of the hunting expeditions.

Ordinarily, however, both the surface excitement required in com- mercial fiction and the significant meaning found in literary fiction arise out of some sort of conflict—a clash of actions, ideas, desires, or wills. Characters may be pitted against some other person or group of persons (conflict of person against person); they may be in conflict with some external force—physical nature, society, or “fate” (conflict of person against environment); or they may be in conflict with some elements in their own natures (conflict of person against himself or herself). The conflict may be physical, mental, emotional, or moral. There is conflict in a chess game— during which the competitors sit quite still for hours—as surely as in a wrestling match; emotional conflict may be raging within a person sitting alone in a silent room.

The central character in a conflict, whether sympathetic or unsym- pathetic as a person, is called the protagonist; occasionally there may be more than one protagonist in a story. (The technical term protagonist is preferable to the popular term hero or heroine because it is less ambiguous. The protagonist is simply the central character; the term hero or heroine implies that the central character has heroic qualities, which is often not the case.) Any force arranged against the protagonist—whether persons, things, conventions of society, or the protagonist’s own character traits—is the antagonist. In some stories the conflict is single, clear-cut, and easily identifiable. In others it is multiple, various, and subtle. A person may be in conflict with other individuals, with social norms or nature, and with herself or himself all at the same time, and sometimes may be involved in conflict without being aware of it.

“The Most Dangerous Game” illustrates most of these kinds of con- flict. Rainsford, the protagonist, is pitted first against other men—against Whitney and General Zaroff in the discussions preceding the manhunt, and against Zaroff and Ivan during the manhunt. Early in the story he is pitted against nature when he falls into the sea and cannot get back to the yacht. At the beginning of the manhunt, he is in conflict with himself when he tries to fight off panic by repeating to himself, “I must keep my nerve. I must keep my nerve.” The various conflicts illuminated in this story are physical (Rainsford against the sea and Zaroff), mental ( Rainsford’s initial conflict of ideas with Whitney and his battle of wits with Zaroff during the manhunt, which Zaroff refers to as “outdoor chess”), emotional (Rainsford’s efforts to control his terror), and moral (Rainsford’s refusal to “condone cold-blooded murder,” in contrast to Zaroff’s contempt for “romantic ideas about the value of human life”).

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Excellent literary fiction has been written utilizing all four of these major kinds of conflict. Much commercial fiction, however, emphasizes only the confrontation between man and man, depending on the element of physical conflict to supply the primary excitement. For instance, it is hard to conceive of a western story without a fistfight or a gunfight. Even in the most formulaic kinds of fiction, however, something more will be found than mere physical action. Good people will be arrayed against bad ones, and thus the conflict will also be between moral values. In commer- cial fiction this conflict often is clearly defined in terms of moral absolutes: the “good guy” versus the “bad guy.” In literary fiction, the contrasts are usually less distinct. Good may be opposed to good, or half-truth to half- truth. There may be difficulty in determining what is good or bad, causing internal conflict rather than physical confrontation. In the real world, of course, significant moral issues are seldom sharply defined—judgments are difficult, and choices are complex rather than simple. Literary writers are aware of this complexity and are more concerned with displaying its various shadings of moral values than with presenting glaring, simplistic contrasts of good and evil, right and wrong.

Suspense is the quality in a story that makes readers ask, “What’s going to happen next?” or “How will this turn out?” Such questions com- pel them to keep reading. Suspense increases when a reader’s curiosity is combined with anxiety about the fate of a likable, sympathetic character. Thus, in old serial movies—often appropriately called “cliff-hangers”—a strong element of suspense was created at the end of each episode by leav- ing the hero hanging from the edge of a cliff or the heroine tied to railroad tracks with an express train rapidly approaching. In murder mysteries— often called “whodunits”—the main element of suspense is the reader’s desire to know who committed the murder. In love stories the reader wants to know if the boy will win the girl, or if the lovers will be reunited.

In more literary forms of fiction the suspense often involves not so much the question what as the question why—not “What will happen next?” but “Why is the protagonist behaving this way? How is the pro- tagonist’s behavior to be explained in terms of human personality and character?” The forms of suspense range from crude to subtle and may involve not only actions but psychological considerations and moral issues as well. Writers use two common devices to create suspense: they intro- duce an element of mystery (an unusual set of circumstances for which the reader craves an explanation) or they place the protagonist in a dilemma (a position in which he or she must choose between two courses of action, both undesirable). But suspense can readily be created for most readers by placing anybody on a seventeenth-story window ledge or simply by bring- ing together two attractive, sexy young people.

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In “The Most Dangerous Game,” the author initiates suspense in the opening sentences with Whitney’s account of the mystery of “Ship-Trap Island,” of which sailors “have a curious dread”—a place that seems to ema- nate evil. The mystery grows when, in this out-of-the-way spot, Rainsford discovers an enormous château with a leering gargoyle knocker on its mas- sive door and confronts a bearded giant pointing a long-barreled revolver straight at his heart. Connell introduces a second mystery when General Zaroff tells Rainsford that he hunts “more dangerous game” on this island than the Cape buffalo. He then frustrates Rainsford’s (and the reader’s) curiosity for some thirty-six paragraphs before revealing what the game is. Meanwhile, by placing the protagonist in physical danger, Connell intro- duces a second kind of suspense. Initiated by Rainsford’s fall into the sea and his confrontation with Ivan, this second kind becomes the principal source of suspense in the second half of the story. Simply put, the issues of whether Rainsford will escape and how he will escape are what keep the reader absorbed in the story.

The manhunt itself begins with a dilemma. Rainsford must choose among three undesirable courses of action: he can hunt men with Zaroff; he can let himself be hunted; or he can submit to a presumably torturous death at the hands of Ivan. During the hunt, he is faced with other dilemmas. For instance, on the third day, pursued by Zaroff’s 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.”

Suspense is usually the most important criterion for good commercial fiction; unless a story makes us want to keep reading it, it can have little merit. In literary fiction, however, suspense is less important than other elements the author uses to engage the reader’s interest: such a story may be amusing, well written, morally penetrating, peopled by intriguing characters; or it may feature some combination of all these elements. One test of a literary story is to determine whether it creates a desire to read it again. Like a play by Shakespeare, a successful literary story should create an even richer reading experience on the second or third encounter—even though we already know what is going to happen—than on a first reading. By contrast, when an author creates suspense artificially—by the simple withholding of vital information, for instance—readers will feel that the author’s purpose is simply to keep them guessing what will happen next, not to reveal some insight into human experience. Either a commercial or a literary story could be written, for example, about the man on the seventeenth-story window ledge; but the literary story would focus less on whether the man will jump than on the psychological factors and life experiences that brought him to the ledge in the first place. The commer- cial story would keep us asking, “What happens next?” The literary story

CHAPTER TWO / PLOT AND STRUCTURE 101

will make us wonder, “Why do things happen as they do?” or “What is the significance of this event?”

Closely connected with the element of suspense in fiction is the element of surprise. If we know ahead of time exactly what is going to happen in a story and why, there can be no suspense; as long as we do not know, whatever happens comes with an element of surprise. The sur- prise is proportional to the unexpectedness of what happens; it becomes pronounced when the story departs radically from our expectation. In the short story, such radical departure is most often found in a surprise end- ing: one that features a sudden, unexpected turn or twist. In this book, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (page 554) is a good example of a tale with such an ending.

As with physical action and suspense, commercial fiction tends to fea- ture a surprise ending more frequently than literary fiction. But in either type of story, there are two ways by which the legitimacy and value of a surprise ending may be judged: (1) by the fairness with which the surprise is achieved and (2) by the purpose that it serves. If the surprise is contrived through an improbable coincidence or series of coincidences, or by the planting of false clues (details whose only purpose is to mislead the reader), or through the arbitrary withholding of information, then we may well dismiss it as a cheap trick. If, on the other hand, the ending that at first is such a surprise comes to seem perfectly logical and natural the more we think about it and look back over the story, we will feel the surprise was achieved fairly. Again, a surprise ending may be judged as trivial if it exists simply for its own sake—to shock or to titillate the reader. We may judge it as a fraud if it serves, as it does in more formulaic commercial fiction, to conceal earlier weaknesses in the story by giving us a shiny bauble at the end to absorb and concentrate our attention. We will consider a surprise ending justified, however, when it serves to broaden or to reinforce the meaning of the story. In literary fiction, the surprise is one that furnishes meaningful illumination, not just a reversal of expectation.

Whether or not a commercial story has a surprise ending, it almost always has a happy ending: the protagonist must solve her problems, defeat an adversary, win her man, and “live happily ever after.” A common obstacle confronting readers who are making their first attempt to enjoy literary fiction is that such fiction often (though certainly not always) ends unhappily. They are likely to label such stories as “depressing” and to com- plain that “real life has enough troubles of its own” or, conversely, that “real life is seldom as unhappy as all that.”

Two justifications may be made for the unhappy ending. First, many situations in real life do have unpleasant outcomes; therefore, if fiction is to reflect and illuminate life, it must acknowledge human defeats as well

102 FICTION / THE ELEMENTS OF FICTION

as triumphs. Commercial writers of sports fiction usually write of how an individual or a team achieves victory against formidable odds. Yet if one team wins the pennant, thirteen others must lose it; if a golfer wins a tour- nament, fifty or a hundred others must fail to win. In situations like these, at least, success is much less frequent than failure. Varying the formula, a sports writer might tell how an individual lost the game but learned some important moral lesson—for instance, the importance of fair play. But here again, in real life, people achieve such compensations only occasionally. Defeat, in fact, sometimes embitters people and makes them less able to cope with life than before. Thus we need to understand and perhaps expect defeat as well as victory.

The second justification for an unhappy ending is its value in forc- ing us to ponder the complexities of life. The story with a happy ending has been “wrapped up” for us: it sends the reader away feeling pleasantly and vaguely satisfied with the world, and it requires no further thought. The unhappy ending, on the other hand, may cause readers to brood over the outcome, to relive the story in their minds, and by searching out its implications to get much more meaning and significance from it. Just as we can judge individuals better when we see how they behave in times of trouble, so we can see deeper into life when it is pried open for inspection. The unhappy ending is also more likely to raise significant issues. Shakespeare’s tragedies reverberate in our minds much longer and more resonantly than his comedies. The ending of “The Most Dan- gerous Game” resolves all our anxieties, but the ending of “Hunters in the Snow” forces us to think about the mysteries and contradictions of human nature.

Readers of literary fiction evaluate an ending not by whether it is happy or unhappy but by whether it is logical within the story’s own terms and if it affords a full, believable revelation. An ending that meets these tests can be profoundly satisfying, whether happy or unhappy. In fact, some artistically satisfying stories have no ending at all in the sense that the central conflict is resolved in favor of protagonist or antagonist. In real life some problems are never solved and some battles never perma- nently won. A story, therefore, may have an indeterminate ending, one in which no definitive conclusion is reached. There must be some kind of conclusion, of course; a story, which must have artistic unity, cannot sim- ply stop. But the conclusion need not be in terms of a resolved conflict. We cannot be sure whether Tub and Frank in “Hunters in the Snow” will maintain their alliance, or what the ultimate fate of their “friendship” might be. But the story is more effective without a definite resolution, for it leaves us to ponder the complex psychological dynamics that operate within human relationships.

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Artistic unity is essential to a good plot. There must be nothing in the story that is irrelevant, that does not contribute to the meaning; there should be nothing there for its own sake or its own excitement. Good writ- ers exercise rigorous selection: they include nothing that does not advance the central intention of the story. But they not only select; they also arrange. Authors place the story’s incidents and scenes in the most effective order, which is not necessarily the chronological order (although, when we place them in chronological order, they must form a logical progression). In a carefully unified story, each event grows out of the preceding one and leads logically to the next. The author links scenes together in a chain of cause and effect. With such a story the reader should not feel that events might as easily have taken one turn as another; at the same time, the author’s han- dling of plot should not be heavy-handed but should have a quality of natu- ral inevitability, given the specific set of characters and the initial situation.

An author who includes a turn in the plot that is unjustified by the situation or the characters is indulging in plot manipulation. An unmoti- vated action is one instance of such manipulation. Similarly, the reader feels manipulated if the plot relies too heavily on chance or on coincidence to provide a resolution to a story. This kind of resolution is sometimes called a deus ex machina (Latin for “god from a machine”) after the practice of some ancient Greek dramatists in having a god descend from heaven at the last minute (presented in the theater by means of a mechanical stage device) to rescue the protagonist from some impossible situation. But while this was an accepted convention in Greek drama, such a resolution is seldom convincing in fiction. The action should grow organically out of the plot rather than end with an arbitrary, chance resolution for which the author has laid no groundwork earlier in the story.

Chance cannot be barred from fiction, of course, any more than it can be barred from life; the same is true of coincidence. Chance is the occurrence of an event that has no apparent cause in previous events or in predisposition of character, while coincidence is the chance occurrence of two events that may have a peculiar correspondence. But if an author uses an improbable chance event to resolve a story, the story loses its sense of conviction and thus its power to move the reader. The use of coincidence in fiction is even more problematic, since coincidence is chance compounded. Coincidence may jus- tifiably be used to initiate a story, and occasionally to complicate it, but not to resolve it. Its use is objectionable in proportion to its improbability, its importance to the story, and its nearness to the ending. If two characters in a story both start talking of the same topic at once, it may be a coincidence but not necessarily an objectionable one. But if both decide suddenly and at the same time to kill their mothers, the coincidence would be less believable. The use of even a highly improbable coincidence may be perfectly appropriate

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at the start of a story. Just as a chemist may wonder what will happen if certain chemical elements are mixed together in a test tube, an author may wonder what will happen if two former lovers accidentally meet in Majorca, where they longed as young lovers to go, many years after they have each married someone else. The improbable initial situation is justified because it offers a chance to observe human nature in conditions that may be particu- larly revealing, and readers of literary fiction should demand only that the author develop a story logically from that initial situation. But the writer who uses a similar coincidence to resolve a story is imposing an unlikely pattern on human experience rather than revealing any human truth. It is often said that fact is stranger than fiction: in fact, convincing fiction often cannot include some of the more bizarre occurrences (including chance and coincidence) that sometimes happen in life. In life, almost any sequence of events is possible; but in a story the sequence must be plausible in order to convince and hold the reader.

There are various approaches to the analysis of plot. We may, if we wish, draw diagrams of different kinds of plots or trace the development of rising action, climax, and falling action. Tracing such structural patterns, however, if they are concerned only with examining the plot in isolation, will not take us very far into the story. A more profitable approach is to consider the function of plot in trying to understand the relationship of each incident to the larger meaning of the story. In literary fiction, plot is impor- tant for what it reveals. Analyzing a story by focusing on its central conflict may be especially fruitful, for this quickly takes the reader to the primary issue in the story. In evaluating fiction for its quality, it is useful to examine the way incidents and scenes are connected as a way of testing the story’s plausibility and unity. In any good story, plot is inextricable from other ele- ments of fiction to be considered in later chapters: characterization, point of view, and so forth. It provides a kind of map, or guide, but it cannot serve as a substitute for the reader’s journey into the author’s fictional landscape.

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R T WO

1. Define the term plot. 2. Describe the importance of conflict in fiction. 3. Differentiate between the protagonist and the antagonist in a story. 4. Explore the importance of the element of surprise in fiction. 5. Consider the differences between a happy, an unhappy, and an

indeterminate ending. 6. Review the importance of artistic unity in literary fiction.

GREENE / THE DESTRUCTORS 105

GRAHAM GREENE

The Destructors 1

It was 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 had 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 her- self better than the neighbors. 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 destructors First published in 1954. The setting is London nine years after the conclusion of World War II (1939–1945). During the first sustained bombing attacks on London (“the first blitz”) from September 1940 to May 1941, many families slept in the Underground (i.e., subway) stations, which were used as bomb shelters. “Trevor” was typically an upper-class English name. Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), England’s most famous architect, designed St. Paul’s Cathedral and many other late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century buildings. Graham Greene (1904–1991), who was born just outside London, lived in that city at various stages of his life.

Bank Holiday: three-day weekend in Britain, one of several during the year

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the bomb and the side walls were supported on wooden struts. A smaller bomb and some incendiaries had fallen beyond, so that the house stuck up like a jagged tooth and carried on the further wall relics of its neighbor, 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 knowl- edge 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 sur- prising. 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 somber conviction. He handed over three packets of Smarties.

The gang were puzzled and perturbed by this action and tried to explain it away. “Bet someone dropped them and he picked ’em up,” some- body 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 sac-

rificed the whole morning to the game of bouncing that only Mike was young enough to enjoy. There was no sign from Mr. Thomas.

5

10

15

Next day T. astonished them all. He was late at the rendezvous, and the voting for the day’s exploit took place without him. At Blackie’s sug- gestion 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 to 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 to try some case of deviation. T. said, “It’s a beauti- ful 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 paneling.” “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.

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“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 his 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 asked.

“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 stair- case, 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?”

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Wormsley Common Empire: a music hall for revues and popular entertainments

“Today,” Mike said tactlessly, “we’re pinching free rides . . .” “Free rides,” T. said. “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 favor?” 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 favor. He thought of going home, of never returning, of letting them all discover the hollowness of T.’s 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 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. Anyone else 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.”

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“I’ll get one myself,” T. said. “I don’t want your money. But I can’t buy a sledgehammer.”

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.”

2

On Sunday morning all were punctual except Blackie, even Mike. Mike had 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 had difficulty in smuggling out the saw, and then in finding the sledgehammer 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 sledgehammer. 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 outer 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 floor- boards 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 signaled 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

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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 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 sledgehammer.”

“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.”

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“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. 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.

3

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 said. “I’ve been given a bob for slot machines. This is like work.”

“We’ve hardly started,” T. said. “Why, there’s all the floor left, and the stairs. We haven’t taken out a single window. You voted like the oth- ers. 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 to 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 win- dows it was too late to reach them. “Cor,” Joe said, and dropped a penny down in the dry rubble-filled well. It cracked and spun among 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.

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“The bogies?”° Summers asked. “Old Misery,” Mike said. “He’s on his way.” He put his head between

his knees and retched. “Ran all the 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 shat-

tered hollowed house with nothing left but the walls. Yet the walls could be preserved. Façades 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.”

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loo: outdoor toilet (an older term for “lav”)

“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 bombsites, 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 shout- ing: 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,

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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 regu- lar. 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,” he said. “Always get ‘em on Bank Holiday. I’ve got to go 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

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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.

4

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 damp 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 his 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 com-

fortable 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

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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 car 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 desola- tion 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 remem-

bered the sudden check to 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.”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Who is the protagonist in this story—Trevor, Blackie, or the gang? Who or what is the antagonist? Identify the conflicts of the story.

2. How is suspense created? 3. This story uses the most common basic formula of commercial fiction: protago-

nist aims at a goal, is confronted with various obstacles between himself and his goal, overcomes the obstacles, and achieves his goal. How does this story differ from commercial fiction in its use of this formula? Does the story have a happy ending?

4. Discuss the gang’s motivations, taking into account (a) the age and beauty of the house, (b) Blackie’s reasons for not going home after losing his position of leadership, (c) the seriousness with which the boys work at their task, and their loss of concern over their leadership, (d) the burning of the pound notes, (e) their consideration for Old Misery, (f) the lorry driver’s reaction. What characteristics do the gang’s two named exploits—pinching free rides and destroying the house—have in common?

5. Of what significance, if any, is the setting of this story in blitzed London? Does the story have anything to say about the consequences of war? About the causes of war?

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ISHIGURO / A FAMILY SUPPER 133

KAZUO ISHIGURO

A Family Supper Fugu is a fish caught off the Pacific shores of Japan. The fish has held a

special significance for me ever since my mother died through eating one. The poison resides in the sexual glands of the fish, inside two fragile bags. When preparing the fish, these bags must be removed with caution, for any clumsiness will result in the poison leaking into the veins. Regrettably, it is not easy to tell whether or not this operation has been carried out successfully. The proof is, as it were, in the eating.

Fugu poisoning is hideously painful and almost always fatal. If the fish has been eaten during the evening, the victim is usually overtaken by pain during his sleep. He rolls about in agony for a few hours and is dead by morning. The fish became extremely popular in Japan after the war. Until stricter regulations were imposed, it was all the rage to perform the hazardous gutting operation in one’s own kitchen, then to invite neighbors and friends round for the feast.

At the time of my mother’s death, I was living in California. My relationship with my parents had become somewhat strained around that period, and consequently I did not learn of the circumstances surrounding her death until I returned to Tokyo two years later. Apparently, my mother had always refused to eat fugu, but on this particular occasion she had made an exception, having been invited by an old schoolfriend whom she was anxious not to offend. It was my father who supplied me with the details as we drove from the airport to his home in the Kamakura district. When we finally arrived, it was nearing the end of a sunny autumn day.

“Did you eat on the plane?” my father asked. We were sitting on the tatami floor of his tea-room.

“They gave me a light snack.” “You must be hungry. We’ll eat as soon as Kikuko arrives.” My father was a formidable-looking man with a large stony jaw and

furious black eyebrows. I think now in retrospect that he much resembled Chou En-lai,° although he would not have cherished such a comparison, being particularly proud of the pure samurai blood that ran in the family. His general presence was not one which encouraged relaxed conversation; neither were things helped much by his odd way of stating each remark as

5

a family supper First published in 1982. Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954) was born in Japan but has lived most of his life in England. His novels include the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day (1989) and The Unconsoled (1995).

Chou En-lai: or Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), the first premier of the People’s Republic of China.

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if it were the concluding one. In fact, as I sat opposite him that afternoon, a boyhood memory came back to me of the time he had struck me several times around the head for “chattering like an old woman.” Inevitably, our conversation since my arrival at the airport had been punctuated by long pauses.

“I’m sorry to hear about the firm,” I said when neither of us had spoken for some time. He nodded gravely.

“In fact the story didn’t end there,” he said. “After the firm’s collapse, Watanabe killed himself. He didn’t wish to live with the disgrace.”

“I see.” “We were partners for seventeen years. A man of principle and honor.

I respected him very much.” “Will you go into business again?” I said. “I am—in retirement. I’m too old to involve myself in new ventures

now. Business these days has become so different. Dealing with foreigners. Doing things their way. I don’t understand how we’ve come to this. Neither did Watanabe.” He sighed. “A fine man. A man of principle.”

The tea-room looked out over the garden. From where I sat I could make out the ancient well which as a child I had believed haunted. It was just visible now through the thick foliage. The sun had sunk low and much of the garden had fallen into shadow.

“I’m glad in any case that you’ve decided to come back,” my father said. “More than a short visit, I hope.”

“I’m not sure what my plans will be.” “I for one am prepared to forget the past. Your mother too was always

ready to welcome you back—upset as she was by your behavior.” “I appreciate your sympathy. As I say, I’m not sure what my plans are.” “I’ve come to believe now that there were no evil intentions in your

mind,” my father continued. “You were swayed by certain—influences. Like so many others.”

“Perhaps we should forget it, as you suggest.” “As you will. More tea?” Just then a girl’s voice came echoing through the house. “At last.” My father rose to his feet. “Kikuko has arrived.” Despite our difference in years, my sister and I had always been close.

Seeing me again seemed to make her excessively excited and for a while she did nothing but giggle nervously. But she calmed down somewhat when my father started to question her about Osaka and her university. She answered him with short formal replies. She in turn asked me a few questions, but she seemed inhibited by the fear that her questions might lead to awkward topics. After a while, the conversation had become even sparser than prior to Kikuko’s arrival. Then my father stood up, saying:

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“I must attend to the supper. Please excuse me for being burdened down by such matters. Kikuko will look after you.”

My sister relaxed quite visibly once he had left the room. Within a few minutes, she was chatting freely about her friends in Osaka and about her classes at university. Then quite suddenly she decided we should walk in the garden and went striding out onto the veranda. We put on some straw sandals that had been left along the veranda rail and stepped out into the garden. The daylight had almost gone.

“I’ve been dying for a smoke for the last half-hour,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

“Then why didn’t you smoke?” She made a furtive gesture back toward the house, then grinned

mischievously. “Oh I see,” I said. “Guess what? I’ve got a boyfriend now.” “Oh yes?” “Except I’m wondering what to do. I haven’t made up my mind yet.” “Quite understandable.” “You see, he’s making plans to go to America. He wants me to go with

him as soon as I finish studying.” “I see. And you want to go to America?” “If we go, we’re going to hitch-hike.” Kikuko waved a thumb in

front of my face. “People say it’s dangerous, but I’ve done it in Osaka and it’s fine.”

“I see. So what is it you’re unsure about?” We were following a narrow path that wound through the shrubs

and finished by the old well. As we walked, Kikuko persisted in taking unnecessarily theatrical puffs on her cigarette.

“Well. I’ve got lots of friends now in Osaka. I like it there. I’m not sure I want to leave them all behind just yet. And Suichi—I like him, but I’m not sure I want to spend so much time with him. Do you understand?”

“Oh perfectly.” She grinned again, then skipped on ahead of me until she had reached

the well. “Do you remember,” she said, as I came walking up to her, “how you used to say this well was haunted?”

“Yes, I remember.” We both peered over the side. “Mother always told me it was the old woman from the vegetable store

you’d seen that night,” she said. “But I never believed her and never came out here alone.”

“Mother used to tell me that too. She even told me once the old woman had confessed to being the ghost. Apparently she’d been taking a

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short cut through our garden. I imagine she had some trouble clambering over these walls.”

Kikuko gave a giggle. She then turned her back to the well, casting her gaze about the garden.

“Mother never really blamed you, you know,” she said, in a new voice. I remained silent. “She always used to say to me how it was their fault, hers and Father’s, for not bringing you up correctly. She used to tell me how much more careful they’d been with me, and that’s why I was so good.” She looked up and the mischievous grin had returned to her face. “Poor Mother,” she said.

“Yes. Poor Mother.” “Are you going back to California?” “I don’t know. I’ll have to see.” “What happened to—to her? To Vicki?” “That’s all finished with,” I said. “There’s nothing much left for me

now in California.” “Do you think I ought to go there?” “Why not? I don’t know. You’ll probably like it.” I glanced toward

the house. “Perhaps we’d better go in soon. Father might need a hand with the supper.”

But my sister was once more peering down into the well. “I can’t see any ghosts,” she said. Her voice echoed a little.

“Is Father very upset about his firm collapsing?” “Don’t know. You can never tell with Father.” Then suddenly she

straightened up and turned to me. “Did he tell you about old Watanabe? What he did?”

“I heard he committed suicide.” “Well, that wasn’t all. He took his whole family with him. His wife

and his two little girls.” “Oh yes?” “Those two beautiful little girls. He turned on the gas while they were

all asleep. Then he cut his stomach with a meat knife.” “Yes, Father was just telling me how Watanabe was a man of principle.” “Sick.” My sister turned back to the well. “Careful. You’ll fall right in.” “I can’t see any ghost,” she said. “You were lying to me all that time.” “But I never said it lived down the well.” “Where is it, then?” We both looked around at the trees and shrubs. The light in the gar-

den had grown very dim. Eventually I pointed to a small clearing some ten yards away.

“Just there I saw it. Just there.” We stared at the spot.

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“What did it look like?” “I couldn’t see very well. It was dark.” “But you must have seen something.” “It was an old woman. She was just standing there, watching me.” We kept staring at the spot as if mesmerized. “She was wearing a white kimono,” I said. “Some of her hair had come

undone. It was blowing around a little.” Kikuko pushed her elbow against my arm. “Oh be quiet. You’re trying

to frighten me all over again.” She trod on the remains of her cigarette, then for a brief moment stood regarding it with a perplexed expression. She kicked some pine needles over it, then once more displayed her grin. “Let’s see if supper’s ready,” she said.

We found my father in the kitchen. He gave us a quick glance, then carried on with what he was doing.

“Father’s become quite a chef since he’s had to manage on his own,” Kikuko said with a laugh. He turned and looked at my sister coldly.

“Hardly a skill I’m proud of,” he said. “Kikuko, come here and help.” For some moments my sister did not move. Then she stepped forward

and took an apron hanging from a drawer. “Just these vegetables need cooking now,” he said to her. “The rest just

needs watching.” Then he looked up and regarded me strangely for some seconds. “I expect you want to look around the house,” he said eventually. He put down the chopsticks he had been holding. “It’s a long time since you’ve seen it.”

As we left the kitchen I glanced back toward Kikuko, but her back was turned.

“She’s a good girl,” my father said quietly. I followed my father from room to room. I had forgotten how large the

house was. A panel would slide open and another room would appear. But the rooms were all startlingly empty. In one of the rooms the lights did not come on, and we stared at the stark walls and tatami in the pale light that came from the windows.

“This house is too large for a man to live in alone,” my father said. “I don’t have much use for most of these rooms now.”

But eventually my father opened the door to a room packed full of books and papers. There were flowers in vases and pictures on the walls. Then I noticed something on a low table in the corner of the room. I came nearer and saw it was a plastic model of a battleship, the kind constructed by children. It had been placed on some newspaper; scattered around it were assorted pieces of grey plastic.

My father gave a laugh. He came up to the table and picked up the model.

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“Since the firm folded,” he said, “I have a little more time on my hands.” He laughed again, rather strangely. For a moment his face looked almost gentle. “A little more time.”

“That seems odd,” I said. “You were always so busy.” “Too busy perhaps.” He looked at me with a small smile. “Perhaps I

should have been a more attentive father.” I laughed. He went on contemplating his battleship. Then he looked

up. “I hadn’t meant to tell you this, but perhaps it’s best that I do. It’s my belief that your mother’s death was no accident. She had many worries. And some disappointments.”

We both gazed at the plastic battleship. “Surely,” I said eventually, “my mother didn’t expect me to live here

forever.” “Obviously you don’t see. You don’t see how it is for some parents.

Not only must they lose their children, they must lose them to things they don’t understand.” He spun the battleship in his fingers. “These little gunboats here could have been better glued, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps. I think it looks fine.” “During the war I spent some time on a ship rather like this. But my

ambition was always the air force. I figured it like this. If your ship was struck by the enemy, all you could do was struggle in the water hoping for a lifeline. But in an aeroplane—well—there was always the final weapon.” He put the model back onto the table. “I don’t suppose you believe in war.”

“Not particularly.” He cast an eye around the room. “Supper should be ready by now,” he

said. “You must be hungry.” Supper was waiting in a dimly lit room next to the kitchen. The only

source of light was a big lantern that hung over the table, casting the rest of the room into shadow. We bowed to each other before starting the meal.

There was little conversation. When I made some polite comment about the food, Kikuko giggled a little. Her earlier nervousness seemed to have returned to her. My father did not speak for several minutes. Finally he said:

“It must feel strange for you, being back in Japan.” “Yes, it is a little strange.” “Already, perhaps, you regret leaving America.” “A little. Not so much. I didn’t leave behind much. Just some empty

rooms.” “I see.” I glanced across the table. My father’s face looked stony and forbidding

in the half-light. We ate on in silence. Then my eye caught something at the back of the room. At first I con-

tinued eating, then my hands became still. The others noticed and looked at me. I went on gazing into the darkness past my father’s shoulder.

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“Who is that? In that photograph there?” “Which photograph?” My father turned slightly, trying to follow my gaze. “The lowest one. The old woman in the white kimono.” My father put down his chopsticks. He looked first at the photograph,

then at me. “Your mother.” His voice had become very hard. “Can’t you recognize

your own mother?” “My mother. You see, it’s dark. I can’t see it very well.” No one spoke for a few seconds, then Kikuko rose to her feet. She took

the photograph down from the wall, came back to the table and gave it to me.

“She looks a lot older,” I said. “It was taken shortly before her death,” said my father. “It was the dark. I couldn’t see very well.” I looked up and noticed my father holding out a hand. I gave him

the photograph. He looked at it intently, then held it toward Kikuko. Obediently, my sister rose to her feet once more and returned the picture to the wall.

There was a large pot left unopened at the center of the table. When Kikuko had seated herself again, my father reached forward and lifted the lid. A cloud of steam rose up and curled toward the lantern. He pushed the pot a little toward me.

“You must be hungry,” he said. One side of his face had fallen into shadow.

“Thank you.” I reached forward with my chopsticks. The steam was almost scalding. “What is it?”

“Fish.” “It smells very good.” In amidst soup were strips of fish that had curled almost into balls.

I picked one out and brought it to my bowl. “Help yourself. There’s plenty.” “Thank you.” I took a little more, then pushed the pot toward my

father. I watched him take several pieces to his bowl. Then we both watched as Kikuko served herself.

My father bowed slightly. “You must be hungry,” he said again. He took some fish to his mouth and started to eat. Then I too chose a piece and put it in my mouth. It felt soft, quite fleshy against my tongue.

“Very good,” I said. “What is it?” “Just fish.” “It’s very good.” The three of us ate on in silence. Several minutes went by. “Some more?” “Is there enough?”

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“There’s plenty for all of us.” My father lifted the lid and once more steam rose up. We all reached forward and helped ourselves.

“Here,” I said to my father, “you have this last piece.” “Thank you.” When we had finished the meal, my father stretched out his arms and

yawned with an air of satisfaction. “Kikuko,” he said. “Prepare a pot of tea, please.”

My sister looked at him, then left the room without comment. My father stood up.

“Let’s retire to the other room. It’s rather warm in here.” I got to my feet and followed him into the tea-room. The large sliding

windows had been left open, bringing in a breeze from the garden. For a while we sat in silence.

“Father,” I said, finally. “Yes?” “Kikuko tells me Watanabe-San took his whole family with him.” My father lowered his eyes and nodded. For some moments he seemed

deep in thought. “Watanabe was very devoted to his work,” he said at last. “The collapse of the firm was a great blow to him. I fear it must have weakened his judgment.”

“You think what he did—it was a mistake?” “Why, of course. Do you see it otherwise?” “No, no. Of course not.” “There are other things besides work.” “Yes.” We fell silent again. The sound of locusts came in from the garden.

I looked out into the darkness. The well was no longer visible. “What do you think you will do now?” my father asked. “Will you

stay in Japan for a while?” “To be honest, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” “If you wish to stay here, I mean here in this house, you would be very

welcome. That is, if you don’t mind living with an old man.” “Thank you. I’ll have to think about it.” I gazed out once more into the darkness. “But of course,” said my father, “this house is so dreary now. You’ll no

doubt return to America before long.” “Perhaps. I don’t know yet.” “No doubt you will.” For some time my father seemed to be studying the back of his hands.

Then he looked up and sighed. “Kikuko is due to complete her studies next spring,” he said. “Perhaps

she will want to come home then. She’s a good girl.”

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“Perhaps she will.” “Things will improve then.” “Yes, I’m sure they will.” We fell silent once more, waiting for Kikuko to bring the tea.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. The first two paragraphs describe the poisonous fish, fugu, while the characters are not introduced until paragraph 3. Why is this method employed? How does it set the plot into motion?

2. Why was the son chosen as the story’s narrator? What is the significance of his having lived in California? What are the differences in values between him and his father?

3. Discuss the role of the narrator’s sister, Kikuko. Are her values aligned with his or with those of her parents?

4. How does Mr. Watanabe’s suicide relate to the plot? Why did he kill his entire family instead of only himself?

5. Discuss the story’s abrupt ending. How is this ending appropriate to the story?

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. In Wolff ’s “Hunters in the Snow,” the plot helps to illuminate the struggle for power among the three principal characters. Write an essay in which you show how this struggle for power is elucidated by some of the elements of fiction presented in Chapter Two—such as suspense, mystery, surprise, and conflict.

2. Write an essay on the ending of one of the following stories, determining whether it is happy, unhappy, or indeterminate and how the type of ending helps define the story as an example of commercial or literary fiction:

a. Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow” (page 79) b. Carver, “Neighbors” (page 550) c. Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” (page 554) d. Jackson, “The Lottery” (page 264)

3. Write an essay defining the type(s) of conflict in one of these stories: a. Carver, “Neighbors” (page 550) b. Hurston, “Sweat” (page 583) c. Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants” (page 280). d. Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited” (page 199).

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Characterization

The preceding chapter considered plot apart from characterization, as if the two were separable. Actually, along with the other elements of fiction discussed in later chapters, plot and characterization work together in any good story. In commercial fiction, plot is usually more important than in- depth characterization, whereas literary writers are usually more concerned with complex characters than with the mechanics of plot. Many literary fiction writers, in fact, consider characterization to be the most important element of their art.

Analyzing characterization is more difficult than describing plot, for human character is infinitely complex, variable, and ambiguous. Any- one can summarize what a person in a story has done, but a writer needs considerable skill and insight into human beings to describe convincingly who a person is. Even the most complicated plot in a detective story puts far less strain on our understanding than does human nature. This is why commercial fiction may feature an elaborate plot but offer characters who are simple and two-dimensional, even stereotypical. In such fiction the characters must be easily identifiable and clearly labeled as good or bad; the commercial author’s aim is to create characters who can carry the plot forward, not to explore human psychology and motivation.

The main character in a commercial work must also be someone attractive or sympathetic. If the protagonist is male, he need not be per- fect, but usually he must be fundamentally decent—honest, good-hearted, and preferably good-looking. He may also have larger-than-life qualities, showing himself to be daring, dashing, or gallant. He may defy laws made for “ordinary” people, but this makes him even more likable because he breaks the rules for a good reason: to catch a criminal or to prevent a disaster. In commercial fiction, the reader enjoys identifying with such a protagonist, vicariously sharing his adventures, escapes, and triumphs. If the protagonist has vices, they must be the kind a typical reader would not

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mind or would enjoy having. For instance, the main character in successful commercial fiction may be sexually promiscuous—James Bond is a good example—and thus allow readers to indulge imaginatively in pleasures they might not allow themselves in real life.

Literary fiction does not necessarily renounce the attractive character. Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, and Holden Caulfield are literary characters beloved by millions of readers; both the narrator in “A Family Supper” and Edie in “How I Met My Husband” are likable characters as well. But liter- ary protagonists are less easily labeled and pigeonholed than their counter- parts in commercial fiction. Sometimes they may be wholly unsympathetic, even despicable. But because human nature is not often entirely bad or per- fectly good, literary fiction deals usually with characters who are composed of both good and evil impulses, three-dimensional human beings who live in our memory as “real” people long after we have stopped reading.

Such fiction offers an exciting opportunity to observe human nature in all its complexity and multiplicity. It enables us to know people, to under- stand them, and to develop compassion for them in a way we might not do without reading serious fiction. In some respects, we can know fictional char- acters even better than we know real people in our lives. For one thing, we observe fictional people in situations that are always significant and that serve to illuminate their characters in a way that our daily, routine exposure to real people seldom does. We can also view a character’s inner life in a way that’s impossible in ordinary life. Authors can show us, if they wish, exactly what is happening in a character’s mind and emotions. In real life, of course, we can only guess at another person’s thoughts and feelings from external behav- ior, which may be designed to conceal the person’s inner life. Because of the opportunity literary fiction affords us of knowing its characters so thoroughly, it also enables us to understand the motives and behavior of people in real life.

Authors present their characters either directly or indirectly. In direct presentation they tell us straight out, by exposition or analysis, what the characters are like, or they have another character in the story describe them. (Exposition is the presentation of background information that helps place the setting, characters, and plot in context, so that the reader understands the larger dimensions of the story.) In indirect presentation the author shows us the characters through their actions; we determine what they are like by what they say or do. Graham Greene uses direct presentation when he tells us about Blackie: “He was just, he had no jealousy.” He uses indirect presentation when he shows Blackie allowing the gang to vote on Trevor’s project, accepting the end of his leadership fairly calmly, taking orders from Trevor without resentment, burning banknotes with Trevor, and racing him home. In this story, of course, the word “just” has a slight ironic twist—it applies only to behavior within the gang—and Greene presents this indirectly. Alice Munro relies on indirect presentation to show

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that Chris Watters is a charming but irresponsible barnstormer; Edie never directly criticizes him, but we feel her disillusionment as she waits day after day for a letter that will never come.

Sometimes the method of direct presentation has the advantages of being clear and economical, but good writers use it sparingly. In order to involve the reader in a character, the author must show the character in action; the axiom “show, don’t tell” is therefore one of the basics of fiction writing. If characters are merely described, then the story will read more like an essay. The direct method usually has little emotional impact unless it is bolstered by the indirect. It will give us only the explanation of a character, not the impression of a living, breathing human being. In almost all good fiction, therefore, the characters are dramatized. They are shown speaking and behaving, as in a stage play. If we are really to believe in the selfishness of a character, we must see the character acting selfishly. Instead of telling us that Frank in “Hunters in the Snow” is a selfish, self-deluding man, Wolff gives us dramatic scenes in which Frank exhibits his selfishness and self-delusions through his dialogue and actions. Most literary writers rely on indirect presentation and may even use it exclusively.

Good fiction follows three other principles of characterization. First, the characters are consistent in their behavior: they do not behave one way on one occasion and a different way on another unless there is a clear and sufficient reason for the change. Second, the characters’ words and actions spring from motivations the reader can understand and believe; if we can’t understand why they behave in a certain way immediately, that under- standing comes by the end of the story. Finally, the characters must be plausible or lifelike. They cannot be perfectly virtuous or monsters of evil; nor can they have some impossible combination of contradictory traits. In short, the author must convince the reader that the character might well have existed so that, at least while we’re reading, we have the illusion that the person is real and forget we are reading fiction at all.

In his book Aspects of the Novel (1927), the British novelist E. M. Forster introduced terms that have become standard in discussing types of characters; he wrote that a literary character is either “flat” or “round.” Flat characters usually have only one or two predominant traits; they can be summed up in a sentence or two. Richard Connell’s character Ivan, for instance, is a fearsome thug, and that is all we need to know about him. By contrast, round characters are complex and many-sided; they have the three-dimensional quality of real people. Huck Finn, for example, because Mark Twain imagined and dramatized him so successfully as an individual, lives vigorously in the imagination of millions of readers. This is not to say that flat characters cannot be memorable. Even though they are essentially two-dimensional, they too may be made memorable in the hands of an

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expert author who creates some vivid detail of their appearance, gestures, or speech. Ebenezer Scrooge, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, could be defined as a stereotype of the miserly misanthrope; but his “Bah! Humbug!” has helped make him an immortal character.

Whether round or flat, all characters in good fiction are dramatized to whatever extent needed to make them convincing and to fulfill their roles in the story. Most short stories, of course, will have room for only one or two round characters. Minor characters must necessarily remain flat. There are some literary stories, of course, where the exploration of individual character is not the main focus of interest—Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (page 264) is an example—and in such stories none of the characters may be developed fully. Such instances, however, are relatively rare.

A special kind of flat character is the stock character. These are stereotyped figures who have recurred so often in fiction that we recog- nize them at once: the strong, silent sheriff; the brilliant detective with eccentric habits; the mad scientist who performs fiendish experiments on living people; the glamorous international spy of mysterious background; the comic Englishman with a monocle; the cruel stepmother; and so forth. Commercial authors often rely on such stock characters precisely because they can be grasped quickly and easily by the reader. Such characters are like interchangeable parts that might be transferred from one story to another. When literary writers employ a conventional type, however, they usually add individualizing touches to help create a fresh and memorable character. A. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes follows a stock pattern of the detective, but he remains more memorable than hundreds of other fictional detectives who have come and gone since he was created. Similarly, Wolff’s character Tub in “Hunters in the Snow” embodies the stereotypes of the fat, comic buffoon; but certain details about him—his insecurity, his habit of hiding the food he eats so compulsively—help to make him distinctive.

Fictional characters may also be classified as either static or developing. The static character remains essentially the same person from the begin- ning of the story to the end. The developing (or dynamic) character, on the other hand, undergoes some distinct change of character, personality, or outlook. The change may be a large or a small one; it may be positive or negative; but it is something significant and basic, not some minor change of habit or opinion. The Irish writer James Joyce used a term that has become widely adopted today, noting that a character in a story often expe- riences an epiphany, which he termed a moment of spiritual insight into life or into the character’s own circumstances. This epiphany, or insight, usually defines the moment of the developing character’s change.

Edie in Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” is a dynamic character, for she learns a painful lesson about romance and growing up that alters the

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entire course of her life. Many stories show a change in the protagonist as the result of some crucial situation in his or her life. This change is usually at the heart of the story, and defining and explaining the change will be the best way to arrive at its meaning. In commercial fiction, changes in charac- ter are likely to be relatively superficial, intended mainly to effect a happy ending. Readers of literary fiction, however, usually expect that a convinc- ing change in a character meet three conditions: (1) it must be consistent with the individual’s characterization as dramatized in the story; (2) it must be sufficiently motivated by the circumstances in which the character is placed; and (3) the story must offer sufficient time for the change to take place and still be believable. Essential changes in human character, after all, do not usually occur suddenly. For this reason, good fiction will not give us a confirmed criminal who miraculously reforms at the end of a story, or a lifelong racist who wakes up one day and decides to be tolerant and open- minded. If fiction is to be convincing, it must show us believable, dynamic, but often quiet changes or turning points in a character’s life. When an author has carefully laid the groundwork earlier in the story, we believe in the character’s change and experience the moment of epiphany as a possibly small but significant marker in the life of an individual human being.

Ultimately it is the quality of characterization by which a literary story stands or falls. Long after we have read even the greatest novels and short stories, we tend to remember not the incidents of plot but the unforget- table characters who made our reading such a rich, vibrant experience. Through the creation of character, an author can summon up a new person- ality, a new voice, and an entirely new and original way of seeing the world. Such characters come alive each time a reader takes up the story, renewing the miracle of the human imagination.

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R T H R E E

1. Describe the significance of characterization in literary fiction versus commercial fiction.

2. Distinguish between direct and indirect presentation of character in fiction.

3. Review the terms “flat character,” “round character,” and “stock character.”

4. Consider the difference between a static character and a dynamic character.

5. Explore the authors’ use of characterization in the stories that follow in this chapter.

WALKER / EVERYDAY USE 147

ALICE WALKER

Everyday Use for your grandmama

I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.

Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hope- lessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.

You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.

Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated lim- ousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I  meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson° who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she had told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.

In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during

5

everyday use First published in 1973. Alice Walker was born in Georgia in 1944, attended Spelman College for two years, earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence, and was active in the civil rights movement. She has taught and been writer-in-residence at various colleges including Jackson State, Tougaloo, Wellesley, the University of California at Berkeley, and Brandeis. The names adopted by two of the characters in the story reflect the practice among some members of the black community of rejecting names inherited from the period of slavery and selecting others more in keeping with their African heritage. The greetings used by Hakim and Wangero (“Asalamalakim” and “Wa-su-zo-Tean-o”) are apparently adaptations of Arabic and African languages.

Johnny Carson: former host of The Tonight Show on NBC

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the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.

But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.

“How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she’s there, almost hidden by the door.

“Come out into the yard,” I say. Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some

careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is igno- rant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.

Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.

I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised the money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.

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Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her gradu- ation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.

I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passed her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in ’49. Cows are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way.

I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs any more. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?”

She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her, they worshipped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them.

When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.

When she comes I will meet—but there they are! Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way,

but I stay her with my hand. “Come back here,” I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe.

It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always neat- looking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the

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other side of the car comes a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.”

Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Brace- lets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.

“Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with “Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the perspira- tion falling off her chin.

“Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push. You can see me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on the forehead.

Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.

“Well,” I say. “Dee.” “No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!” “What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know. “She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being

named after the people who oppress me.” “You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said.

Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born.

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“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero. “I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said. “And who was she named after?” asked Wangero. “Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s

about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches.

“Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.” “Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say. “There I was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so

why should I try to trace it that far back?” He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody

inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my head.

“How do you pronounce this name?” I asked. “You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero. “Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you,

we’ll call you.” “I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero. “I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.” Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name

twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he was, so I didn’t ask.

“You must belong to those beef-cattle peoples down the road,” I said. They said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they didn’t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight.

Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style.” (They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero [Dee] had really gone and married him.)

We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and corn bread, the greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs.

“Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could

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have.” She jumped up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it.

“This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?”

“Yes,” I said. “Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.” “Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber. Dee (Wangero) looked up at me. “Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low

you almost couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.”

“Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said, sliding a plate over the churn, “and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.”

When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.

After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War.

“Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old quilts?” I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen

door slammed. “Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These old

things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she died.”

“No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine.”

“That’ll make them last better,” I said.

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“That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them.

“Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.

“Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom. “The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for

when she marries John Thomas.” She gasped like a bee had stung her. “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be

backward enough to put them to everyday use.” “I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ’em for long

enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told me they were old-fashioned, out of style.

“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!”

“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.”

Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not under- stand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!”

“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?” “Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with

quilts. Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the

sound her feet made as they scraped over each other. “She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never

winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can ’member Grandma Dee without the quilts.”

I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and it gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s por- tion. This was the way she knew God to work.

When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room,

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snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.

“Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee. But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber. “You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to

the car. “What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know. “Your heritage,” she said. And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her,

and said, “You ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.”

She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and her chin.

Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Characterize the speaker and evaluate her reliability as a reporter and inter- preter of events. Where does she refrain from making judgments? Where does she present less than the full truth? Do these examples of reticence undercut her reliability?

2. Describe as fully as possible the lives of the mother, Dee, and Maggie prior to the events of the story. How are the following incidents from the past also reflected in the present actions: (a) Dee’s hatred of the old house; (b) Dee’s ability “to stare down any disaster”; (c) Maggie’s burns from the fire; (d) the mother’s having been “hooked in the side” while milking a cow; (e) Dee’s refusal to accept a quilt when she went away to college?

3. As evidence of recent social movements and as innovations that the mother responds to, what do the following have in common: (a) Dee’s new name and costume; (b) Hakim’s behavior and attitudes; (c) the “beef-cattle peoples down the road”; (d) Dee’s concern for her “heritage”?

4. Does the mother’s refusal to let Dee have the quilts indicate a permanent or temporary change of character? Why has she never done anything like it before? Why does she do it now? What details in the story prepare for and foreshadow that refusal?

5. How does the physical setting give support to the contrasting attitudes of both the mother and Dee? Does the author indicate that one or the other of them is entirely correct in her feelings about the house and yard?

6. Is Dee wholly unsympathetic? Is the mother’s victory over her altogether positive? What emotional ambivalence is there in the final scene between Maggie and her mother in the yard?

7. Locate examples of direct and indirect presentation. Why does the author use both methods in this story?

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8. Discuss charecterization in the story. Which characters are fully developed, and which are “flat”? Is there a “developing” character here?

9. Locate the “epiphany” in this story. What makes this moment in the story effective?

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Miss Brill Although it was so brilliantly fine—the blue sky powdered with

gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques—Miss 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 drifting—from 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 mind—a little dab of black sealing-wax when the time came—when 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 came from walking, she supposed. And when she breathed, something light and sad—no, not sad, exactly—something 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 someone 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” bit—very 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.

miss brill Written in 1921; first published in 1922. “Jardins Publiques” is French for Public Gardens. Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born and grew up in New Zealand but lived her adult life in London, with various sojourns on the Continent.

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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.

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 sug- gested everything—gold 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 the 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, and—Miss Brill had often noticed—there 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 even—even cupboards!

Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down droop- ing, 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- colored 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 poi- soned. 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

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MANSFIELD / MISS BRILL 157

when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same color 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 him—delighted! She rather thought they were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she’d been—everywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so charming—didn’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 laugh- ing, 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 some one 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 “theater” dog, a little dog that had been drugged, that Miss Brill discovered what it was 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 a point of starting from home at just the same time each week—so as not to be late for the performance—and it also explained why she had quite 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 actress—are 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, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill—a something,

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what was it?—not sadness—no, not sadness—a 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 mov- ing 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 benches—they would come in with a kind of accompaniment— something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautiful—moving .  .  . 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 thought—though 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 all—who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?”

“It’s her fu-fur 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 chère—”

“No, not here,” said the girl. “Not yet.” On her way home she usually bought a slice of honeycake at the bak-

er’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 present—a surprise—something 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 today she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room—her room like a cupboard—and 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.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. We view the people and events of this story almost entirely through the eyes and feelings of its protagonist. The author relies on indirect presentation for her characterization of Miss Brill. After answering the following questions, write as

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BALDWIN / SONNY’S BLUES 159

full an account as you can of the nature and temperament of the story’s main character.

2. What nationality is Miss Brill? What is the story’s setting? Why is it important? 3. How old is Miss Brill? What are her circumstances? Why does she listen in on

conversations? 4. Why does Miss Brill enjoy her Sundays in the park? Why especially this Sunday? 5. Of what importance to the story is the woman in the ermine toque? 6. What is Miss Brill’s mood at the beginning of the story? What is it at the end?

Why? Is she a static or a developing character? 7. What function does Miss Brill’s fur serve in the story? What is the meaning of

the final sentence? 8. Does Miss Brill come to a realization (epiphany) about her life and habits, or

does she manage to suppress the truths that have been presented to her?

JAMES BALDWIN

Sonny’s Blues 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 downtown, for peddling and using heroin.

sonny’s blues First published in 1957. James Baldwin (1924–1987) was one of the most significant chroniclers of African American experience in the twentieth century. His influential novels include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962).

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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 dark- ness 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 laugh- ter 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 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 courtyard. 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

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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 kids still loitering in the courtyard and one of them said good night 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.”

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“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 jukebox was blasting away with something black and bouncy and I half watched the barmaid as she danced her way from the jukebox to her place behind the bar. And I watched her face as she laugh- ingly 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.

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“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 bar- maid, 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 walk- ing. “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 anymore. 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, 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.

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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

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there when he was born; and I had heard the first words he had ever spo- ken. 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, life- less 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

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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 stud- ied 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 miss- ing 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 peo- ple 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 hid- den 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

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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 of her when she was younger. The way I always see her is the way she used to be on a Sun- day 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 absentmindedly stroking the kid’s head. Maybe there’s a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner. The silence, the dark- ness coming, and the darkness in the faces frightens 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.

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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 anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that everytime 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 anymore 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 some- where. 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 any- thing 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.”

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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 bang- ing and clanging behind him, and he ran across the road, and he was mak- ing 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.

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“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 it 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 were 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

jukebox 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 older brother quite so seri- ously before, had scarcely ever, in fact, asked Sonny a damn thing. I sensed

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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 seri-

ous 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 musi- cians 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.”

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“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, sul- lenly, 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.”

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Charlie Parker: Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920–1955), jazz musician, was one of the leading figures of the jazz movement in the 1940s. dicty: bossy.

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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 kind 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 thoughtful- ness, 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 reason- able. 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

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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 was 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.

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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 girl’s 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 her- self. 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 a thousand 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 real- ized 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 anymore 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

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room in the Village, and I tried to make it up. But there were lots of people in the room and Sonny just lay on his bed, and he wouldn’t come down- stairs 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 anymore 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 cer- tainly 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, Grace was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that when she heard that thump and then that silence, some- thing happened in 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, strangled 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 sud- denly 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 the 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.

BALDWIN / SONNY’S BLUES 177

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 street 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 swol- len 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 some- thing 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 pock- ets for change and stood holding it in his hand impatiently, as though he had just remembered a pressing appointment further up the avenue. He

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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 collec- tion 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 went 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 leaf-

ing 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

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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. Some- times 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 pursu- ing 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 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

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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 willpower 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.

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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 don’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, stink- ing 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 try- ing 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 van- ished, 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.

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“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, jam-packed 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 a 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

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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 hear- ing 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 band- stand 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 listen- ing 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 relation- ship 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

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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,

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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, with 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 a while 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.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Describe the plot structure of “Sonny’s Blues.” Is there a relationship between the content of the story and the way the story is constructed?

2. How are the narrator and Sonny characterized? How are they different? In what ways are they similar? Which characters are “flat” and which are “round,” accord- ing to the definitions presented in the chapter?

3. The story contains significant flashbacks. Isolate these flashbacks and describe their importance in achieving a full understanding of the story.

4. Why is the story told from the viewpoint of Sonny’s brother? 5. Is Sonny a sympathetic character? Why or why not? 6. How does the final scene in the nightclub form an appropriate ending to the

story? Is the ending happy, unhappy, or indeterminate? Does this scene contain an “epiphany”?

7. Discuss the ways in which “Sonny’s Blues” depicts significant aspects of African American experience.

186 CHAPTER THREE / CHARACTERIZATION

JAMES JOYCE

Araby North Richmond Street, being blind,° was a quiet street except at the

hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing- room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq.° I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late-tenant’s rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown somber. The space of sky above us was the color of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odors arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps

araby First published in 1914. James Joyce (1882–1941) was born and lived in Dublin, Ireland, until 1904 when he went to Paris, and for the rest of his life he lived abroad and wrote about Dublin. He attended Jesuit school and graduated from University College in Dublin. The short stories collected in his first book, Dubliners, are among the most celebrated and influential of the genre in the modern era.

blind: a dead-end street The Abbot: an 1820 novel by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1834) The Devout Communicant: a Roman Catholic tract published in 1813 The Memoirs of Vidocq: memoirs by a French detective, Francois Vidocq (1775–1857)

JOYCE / ARABY 187

resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlor watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morn- ing. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of laborers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you° about O’Donovan Rossa,° or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises con- verged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times.

At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forget whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.

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come-all-you: an Irish patriotic song O’Donovan Rossa: Jeremiah O’Donovan (1831–1915), an Irish nationalist

188 CHAPTER THREE / CHARACTERIZATION

“And why can’t you?” I asked. While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her

wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.

“It’s well for you,” she said. “If I go,” I said, “I will bring you something.” What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts

after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar Saturday night. My aunt was surprised and hoped it was not some Freemason° affair. I answered few questions in class. I watched my master’s face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not begin- ning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.

On Saturday morning I reminded my uncle that I wished to go to the bazaar in the evening. He was fussing at the hallstand, looking for the hat- brush, and answered me curtly:

“Yes, boy, I know.” As he was in the hall I could not go into the front parlor and lie at

the window. I left the house in bad humor and walked slowly towards the school. The air was pitilessly raw and already my heart misgave me.

When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home. Still it was early. I sat staring at the clock for some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room. I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high cold empty gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing. From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the rail- ings and at the border below the dress.

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Freemason: member of a highly secretive fraternal organization

JOYCE / ARABY 189

When I came downstairs again I found Mrs. Mercer sitting at the fire. She was an old garrulous woman, a pawnbroker’s widow, who collected used stamps for some pious purpose. I had to endure the gossip of the tea-table. The meal was prolonged beyond an hour and still my uncle did not come. Mrs. Mercer stood up to go: she was sorry she couldn’t wait any longer, but it was after eight o’clock and she did not like to be out late, as the night air was bad for her. When she had gone I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists. My aunt said:

“I’m afraid you may put off your bazaar for this night of Our Lord.” At nine o’clock I heard my uncle’s latchkey in the halldoor. I heard

him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten.

“The people are in bed and after their first sleep now,” he said. I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically: “Can’t you give him the money and let him go? You’ve kept him late

enough as it is.” My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed

in the old saying: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. He asked me where I was going and, when I had told him a second time he asked me did I know The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed.° When I left the kitchen he was about to recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt.

I held a florin° tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station. The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey. I took my seat in a third-class carriage of a deserted train. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. It crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, say- ing that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage. In a few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised wooden platform. I passed out on to the road and saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten. In front of me was a large building which displayed the magical name.

I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shil- ling to a weary-looking man. I found myself in a big hall girdled at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part

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The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed: a popular nineteenth-century song florin: a coin worth two shillings

190 CHAPTER THREE / CHARACTERIZATION

of the hall was in darkness. I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the center of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which the words Café Chantant° were written in colored lamps, two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.

Remembering with difficulty why I had come I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation.

“O, I never said such a thing!” “O, but you did!” “O, but I didn’t!” “Didn’t she say that?” “Yes, I heard her.” “O, there’s a . . . fib!” Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to

buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:

“No, thank you.” The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back

to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.

I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Discuss the setting and the way it is described in the opening paragraphs. How is the setting related to the boy’s state of mind?

2. How is the boy characterized? Roughly how old is he and how would you describe his temperament and personality?

3. Analyze the role of Mangan’s sister. Why is she not given a name? How does her physical description relate to the boy’s state of mind?

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Café Chantant: a café with music

SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING 191

4. Describe the role of the boy’s uncle. Can he be called the antagonist? When the uncle returns home, he is talking to himself and moving awkwardly. What are these “signs” the boy says he is able to interpret?

5. How is the bazaar described? How is it different from the reader’s and the boy’s expectations?

6. At the bazaar, there is an inconsequential conversation between the young salesgirl and two Englishmen. Why is this dialogue important? How does the boy react to it?

7. Why does the boy decide not to buy anything for Mangan’s sister? Where in the text would you locate the moment of “epiphany”?

8. Analyze the boy’s feelings as described in the story’s last paragraph. Are his feelings justified? How will he be changed as a result of his experience at the bazaar?

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. Write an essay on the direct or indirect presentation of character in one of the following:

a. Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game” (page 62) b. Greene, “The Destructors” (page 105) c. Ishiguro, “A Family Supper” (page 133) d. Joyce, “Araby” (page 186)

2. Considering the three criteria that are necessary for developing a convincing character, write an essay in which you determine whether one of the following characters meets these criteria:

a. Rainsford in Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game” (page 62) b. Blackie in Greene, “The Destructors” (page 105) c. The narrator in Ishiguro, “A Family Supper” (page 133) d. Sonny in Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (page 159)

Read, highlight, and take notes online.

192

C H A P T E R F O U R

Theme

“Daddy, the man next door kisses his wife every morning when he leaves for work. Why don’t you do that?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t even know the woman.”

“Daughter, your young man stays until a very late hour. Hasn’t your mother said anything to you about this habit of his?”

“Yes, father. Mother says men haven’t altered a bit.”

For readers who contemplate the two jokes above, a significant differ- ence emerges between them. The first joke depends only on a reversal of expectation. We expect the man to explain why he doesn’t kiss his wife; instead he explains why he doesn’t kiss his neighbor’s wife. The second joke, though it contains a reversal of expectation, depends as much or more for its effectiveness on a truth about human life—namely, that people tend to grow more conservative as they grow older or that parents often scold their children for doing exactly what they did themselves when young. This truth, which might be stated in different ways, is the theme of the joke.

The theme of a piece of fiction is its controlling idea or its central insight. It is the unifying generalization about life stated or implied by the story. To derive the theme of a story, we must determine what its central purpose is: what view of life it supports or what insight into life it reveals.

Not all stories have a significant theme. The purpose of a horror story may be simply to scare readers, to give them gooseflesh. The purpose of an adventure story may be simply to carry readers through a series of excit- ing escapades. The purpose of a murder mystery may be simply to pose a problem for readers to try to solve (and to prevent them from solving it, if possible, until the last paragraph). The purpose of some stories may be simply to provide suspense or to make readers laugh or to surprise them with a sudden twist at the end. Theme exists only (1) when an author has

CHAPTER FOUR / THEME 193

seriously attempted to record life accurately or to reveal some truth about it or (2) when an author has deliberately introduced as a unifying element some concept or theory of life that the story illuminates. Theme exists in virtually all literary fiction but only in some commercial fiction. In literary fiction it is the primary purpose of the story; in commercial fiction, it is usually less important than such elements as plot and suspense.

In many stories the theme may be equivalent to the revelation of human character. If a story has as its central purpose to exhibit a certain kind of human being, our statement of theme may be no more than a concentrated description of the person revealed, with the addition, “Some people are like this.” Frequently, however, through its portrayal of specific persons in specific situations a story will have something to say about the nature of all human beings or about their relationship to each other or to the universe. Whatever central generalization about life arises from the specifics of the story constitutes theme.

The theme of a story, like its plot, may be stated very briefly or at greater length. With a simple or very brief story, we may be satisfied to sum up the theme in a single sentence. With a more complex story, if it is successfully unified, we can still state the theme in a single sentence, but we may feel that a paragraph—or occasionally even an essay—is needed to state it adequately. A rich story will give us many and complex insights into life. In stating the theme in a sentence, we must pick the central insight, the one that explains the greatest number of elements in the story and relates them to each other. Theme is what gives a story its unity. In any story at all complex, however, we are likely to feel that a one- sentence statement of theme leaves out a great part of the story’s mean- ing. Although the theme of Othello may be expressed as “Jealousy exacts a terrible cost,” such a statement does not begin to suggest the range and depth of Shakespeare’s play. Any successful story is a good deal more and means a good deal more than any one-sentence statement of theme that we may extract from it, for the story will modify and expand this statement in various and subtle ways.

We must never think, once we have stated the theme of a story, that the whole purpose of the story has been to yield up this abstract statement. If this were so, there would be no reason for the story: we could stop with the abstract statement. The function of literary writers is not to state a theme but to vivify it. They wish to deliver it not simply to our intellects but to our emotions, our senses, and our imaginations. The theme of a story may be little or nothing except as it is embodied and vitalized by the story. Unembodied, it is a dry backbone, without flesh or life.

Sometimes the theme of a story is explicitly stated somewhere in the story, either by the author or by one of the characters. More often, however,

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the theme is implied. Story writers, after all, are story writers, not essayists or philosophers. Their first business is to reveal life, not to comment on it. They may well feel that unless the story somehow expresses its own mean- ing, without their having to point it out, they have not told the story well. Or they may feel that if the story is to have its maximum emotional effect, they must refrain from interrupting it or making remarks about it. They are also wary of spoiling a story for perceptive readers by “explaining” it, just as some people ruin jokes by explaining them. For these reasons theme is more often left implicit than stated explicitly. Good writers do not ordi- narily write a story for the sole purpose of “illustrating” a theme, as do the writers of parables or fables. They write stories to bring alive some segment of human existence. When they do so searchingly and coherently, theme arises naturally out of what they have written. Good readers may state the generalizations for themselves.

Some readers look for a “moral” in everything they read, some rule of conduct that they regard as applicable to their lives. They consider the words theme and moral to be interchangeable. Sometimes the words are interchangeable. Occasionally the theme of a story may be expressed as a moral principle without doing violence to the story. More frequently, however, the word moral is too narrow to fit the kind of illumination pro- vided by a first-rate story. It is hardly suitable, for instance, for the kind of story that simply displays human character. Such nouns as moral, lesson, and message are therefore best avoided in the discussion of fiction. The critical term theme is preferable for several reasons. First, it is less likely to obscure the fact that a story is not a preachment or a sermon: a story’s first object is enjoyment. Second, it should keep us from trying to wring from every story a didactic pronouncement about life. The person who seeks a moral in every story is likely to oversimplify and conventionalize it—to reduce it to some dusty platitude like “Be kind to animals” or “Look before you leap” or “Crime does not pay.”

The purpose of literary story writers is to give us a greater awareness and a greater understanding of life, not to inculcate a code of moral rules for regulating daily conduct. In getting at the theme of the story it is better to ask not What does this story teach? but What does this story reveal? Readers who analyze Ishiguro’s “A Family Supper” as being simply about a conflict between a father and his son have missed nine-tenths of the story. The theme could be stated more accurately this way: “Generational conflicts can lead to disaster unless tempered by honest communication (which the father lacks the ability to initiate) or by mutual understanding (which the father, the son, and the daughter all lack).” Obviously, this dry statement is a poor thing beside the living reality of the story. But it is a more faith- ful abstracting of the story’s content than any pat, cut-and-dried “moral.”

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The revelation offered by a good story may be something fresh or something old. The story may bring us some insight into life that we had not had before, and thus expand our horizons, or it may make us feel or feel again some truth of which we have long been merely intellectually aware. We may know in our minds, for instance, that “War is horrible” or that “Old age is often pathetic and in need of understanding,” but these are insights that need to be periodically renewed. Emotionally we may forget them, and if we do, we are less alive and complete as human beings. Story writers perform a service for us—interpret life for us— whether they give us new insights or refresh and extend old ones.

The themes of commercial and literary stories may be identical, but frequently they are different. Commercial stories, for the most part, con- firm their readers’ prejudices, endorse their opinions, ratify their feelings, and satisfy their wishes. Usually, then, the themes of such stories are widely accepted platitudes of experience that may or may not be supported by the life around us. They represent life as we would like it to be, not always as it is. We should certainly like to believe, for instance, that “motherhood is sacred,” that “true love always wins through,” that “virtue and hard work are rewarded in the end,” that “cheaters never win,” that “old age brings a mellow wisdom that compensates for its infirmity,” and that “every human being has a soft spot in him somewhere.” Literary writers, however, being thoughtful observers of life, are likely to question these beliefs and often to challenge them. Their ideas about life are not simply taken over ready- made from what they were taught in Sunday school or from the books they read as children; they are the formulations of sensitive and independent observers who have collated all that they have read and been taught by life itself. The themes of their stories therefore do not often correspond to the pretty little sentiments we find inscribed in greeting cards. They may sometimes represent rather somber truths. Much of the process of matur- ing as a reader lies in the discovery that there may be more nourishment and deeper enjoyment in these somber truths than in the warm and fuzzy optimism found in so-called “inspirational” fiction.

We do not, however, have to accept the theme of a literary story any more than we do that of a commercial story. Although we should never summarily dismiss it without reflection, we may find that the theme of a story represents a judgment on life with which, on examination, we cannot agree. If it is the reasoned view of a seasoned and serious artist, neverthe- less, it cannot be without value to us. There is value in knowing what the world looks like to others, and we can thus use a judgment to expand our knowledge of human experience even though we cannot ourselves accept it. Genuine artists and thoughtful observers, moreover, can hardly fail to present us with partial insights along the way, although we disagree with

the total view. Therefore, careful readers will not reject a story because they reject its theme. They can enjoy any story that arises from sufficient depth of observation and reflection and is artistically composed, though they disagree with its theme; and they will prefer it to a shallower, less thoughtful, or less successfully integrated story that presents a theme they endorse.

Discovering and stating the theme of a story is often a delicate task. Sometimes we will feel what the story is about strongly enough and yet find it difficult to put this feeling into words. If we are skilled readers, it is per- haps unnecessary that we do so. The bare statement of the theme, so lifeless and impoverished when abstracted from the story, may seem to diminish the story to something less than it is. Often, however, the attempt to state a theme will reveal to us aspects of a story that we should otherwise not have noticed and will thereby lead to more thorough understanding. The ability to state theme, moreover, is a test of our understanding of a story. Careless readers often think they understand a story when in actuality they have misunderstood it. They understand the events but not what the events add up to. Or, in adding up the events, they arrive at an erroneous total. People sometimes miss the point of a joke. It is not surprising that they should occasionally miss the point of a good piece of fiction, which is many times more complex than a joke.

There is no prescribed method for discovering theme. Sometimes we can best get at it by asking in what way the main character has changed in the course of the story and what, if anything, the character has learned before its end. Sometimes the best approach is to explore the nature of the central conflict and its outcome. Sometimes the title will provide an important clue. At all times we should keep in mind the following principles:

1. Theme should be expressible in the form of a statement with a subject and a predicate. It is insufficient to say that the theme of a story is motherhood or loyalty to country. Motherhood and loyalty are simply sub- jects. Theme must be a statement about the subject. For instance, “Mother- hood sometimes has more frustrations than rewards” or “Loyalty to country often inspires heroic self-sacrifice.” If we express the theme in the form of a phrase, the phrase must be convertible to sentence form. A phrase such as “the futility of envy,” for instance, may be converted to the statement “Envy is futile”: it may therefore serve as a statement of theme.

2. The theme should be stated as a generalization about life. In stating theme we do not use the names of the characters or refer to precise places or events, for to do so is to make a specific rather than a general state- ment. The theme of “The Destructors” is not that “The Wormsley Com- mon Gang of London, in the aftermath of World War II, found a creative

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outlet in destroying a beautiful two-hundred-year-old house designed by Sir Christopher Wren.” Rather, it is something like this: “The dislocations caused by a devastating war may produce among the young a conscious or unconscious rebellion against all the values of the reigning society—a rebellion in which the creative instincts are channeled into destructive enterprises.”

3. We must be careful not to make the generalization larger than is justified by the terms of the story. Terms like every, all, always should be used very cautiously; terms like some, sometimes, may are often more accurate. The theme of “Everyday Use” is not that “Habitually compliant and toler- ant mothers will eventually stand up to their bullying children,” for we have only one instance of such behavior in the story. But the story does suf- ficiently present this event as a climactic change in a developing character. Because the story’s narrator recalls precise details of her previous behavior that she brings to bear on her present decision, we can safely infer that this decision will be meaningful and lasting, and should feel that we can gen- eralize beyond the specific situation. The theme might be expressed thus: “A person whose honesty and tolerance have long made her susceptible to the strong will of another may reach a point where she will exert her own will for the sake of justice,” or more generally, “Ingrained habits can be given up if justice makes a greater demand.” Notice that we have said may and can, not will and must. Only occasionally will the theme of a story be expressible as a universal generalization. The bleak, darkly humorous end- ing of “Hunters in the Snow” lets us know that Wolff views all three of his characters as hopelessly “lost” in both the geographical and moral senses of the word. The world contains many people who are essentially predatory, the story seems to say, entirely self-interested “hunters” in a cold universe; even when two individuals form temporary alliances, these are symbiotic relationships in which each person is simply trying to fulfill a selfish need through the other.

4. Theme is the central and unifying concept of a story. Therefore (a) it accounts for all the major details of the story. If we cannot explain the bear- ing of an important incident or character on the theme, either in exempli- fying it or modifying it in some way, it is probable that our interpretation is partial and incomplete, that at best we have got hold only of a subtheme. Another alternative, though it must be used with caution, is that the story itself is imperfectly constructed and lacks unity. (b) The theme is not con- tradicted by any detail of the story. If we have to overlook or blink at or “force” the meaning of some significant detail in order to frame our state- ment, we may be sure that our statement is defective. (c) The theme cannot rely on supposed facts—facts not actually stated or clearly implied by the story. The theme exists inside, not outside, the story. The statement of it

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must be based on the data of the story itself, not on assumptions supplied from our own experience.

5. There is no one way of stating the theme of a story. The story is not a guessing game or an acrostic that is supposed to yield some magic verbal formula that won’t work if a syllable is changed. It merely presents a view of life, and, as long as the previously stated conditions are fulfilled, that view may surely be stated in more than one way. Here, for instance, are three possible ways of stating the theme of “Miss Brill”: (a) A person living alone may create a protective fantasy life by dramatizing insignificant activities, but such a life can be jeopardized when she is forced to see herself as others see her. (b) Isolated elderly people, unsupported by a network of family and friends, may make a satisfying adjustment through a pleas- ant fantasy life, but when their fantasy is punctured by the cold claw of reality, the effect can be devastating. (c) Loneliness is a pitiable emotional state that may be avoided by refusing to acknowledge that one feels lonely, although such an avoidance may also require one to create unrealistic fantasies about oneself.

6. We should avoid any statement that reduces the theme to some familiar saying that we have heard all our lives, such as “You can’t judge a book by its cover” or “A stitch in time saves nine.” Although such a statement may express the theme accurately, too often it is simply a lazy shortcut that impoverishes the essential meaning of the story in order to save mental effort. When readers force every new experience into an old formula, they lose the chance for a fresh perception. Beware of using clichés when attempting to summarize a story’s theme. To decide that “love is blind” is the theme of “How I Met My Husband” is to indulge in a reduc- tive absurdity. When a ready-made phrase comes to mind as the theme of a story, this may be a sign that the reader should think more deeply and thoroughly about the author’s central purpose.

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R F O U R

1. Review the definition of “theme” in fiction. 2. Describe the best way(s) in which the theme of a story may be

stated. 3. Distinguish between the theme of a story and the central purpose

of a story. 4. Differentiate between the typical themes of commercial vs. literary

stories. 5. Review the six principles relating to theme as described in this chapter.

FITZGERALD / BABYLON REVISITED 199

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Babylon Revisited 1

“And where’s Mr. Campbell?” Charlie asked. “Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell’s a pretty sick man, Mr. Wales.” “I’m sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?” Charlie inquired. “Back in America, gone to work.” “And where is the Snow Bird?” “He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer, is in

Paris.” Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago. Charlie

scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page. “If you see Mr. Schaeffer, give him this,” he said. “It’s my brother-in-

law’s address. I haven’t settled on a hotel yet.” He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the

stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more—he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back into France. He felt the stillness from the moment he got out of the taxi and saw the doorman, usually in a frenzy of activity at this hour, gos- siping with a chasseur° by the servants’ entrance.

Passing through the corridor, he heard only a single, bored voice in the once-clamorous women’s room. When he turned into the bar he travelled the twenty feet of green carpet with his eyes fixed straight ahead by old habit; and then, with his foot firmly on the rail, he turned and surveyed the room, encountering only a single pair of eyes that fluttered up from a newspaper in the corner. Charlie asked for the head barman, Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom-built car—disembarking, however, with due nicety at the nearest corner. But Paul was at his country house today and Alix giving him information.

“No, no more,” Charlie said, “I’m going slow these days.” Alix congratulated him: “You were going pretty strong a couple of

years ago.”

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babylon revisited First published in 1931. The ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon is a symbol of decadence and corruption. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–l940) published dozens of short stories during the 1920s and 1930s, along with such celebrated novels as The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934). He and his wife, Zelda, parents of a daughter named Scottie, lived an affluent lifestyle during the 1920s, spending much of the decade in Paris. Fitzgerald battled alcoholism for most of his adult life, and Zelda suffered from mental illness that led to her being institutionalized in the 1930s and 1940s.

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“I’ll stick to it all right,” Charlie assured him. “I’ve stuck to it for over a year and a half now.”

“How do you find conditions in America?” “I haven’t been to America for months. I’m in business in Prague,

representing a couple of concerns there. They don’t know about me down there.”

Alix smiled. “Remember the night of George Hardt’s bachelor dinner here?” said

Charlie. “By the way, what’s become of Claude Fessenden?” Alix lowered his voice confidentially: “He’s in Paris, but he doesn’t

come here any more. Paul doesn’t allow it. He ran up a bill of thirty thou- sand francs, charging all his drinks and his lunches, and usually his dinner, for more than a year. And when Paul finally told him he had to pay, he gave him a bad check.”

Alix shook his head sadly. “I don’t understand it, such a dandy fellow. Now he’s all bloated up—”

He made a plump apple of his hands. Charlie watched a group of strident queens installing themselves in a

corner. “Nothing affects them,” he thought. “Stocks rise and fall, people loaf

or work, but they go on forever.” The place oppressed him. He called for the dice and shook with Alix for the drink.

“Here for long, Mr. Wales?” “I’m here for four or five days to see my little girl.” “Oh-h! You have a little girl?” Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily

through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros° gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank.

Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent,° were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano’s Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval’s. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.

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bistros: cafés La Plus que Lent: “Slower than Slow,” a piano piece by Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

FITZGERALD / BABYLON REVISITED 201

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

He was thirty-five, and good to look at. The Irish mobility of his face was sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes. As he rang his brother- in-law’s bell in the Rue Palatine, the wrinkle deepened till it pulled down his brows; he felt a cramping sensation in his belly. From behind the maid who opened the door darted a lovely little girl of nine who shrieked “Daddy!” and flew up, struggling like a fish, into his arms. She pulled his head around by one ear and set her cheek against his.

“My old pie,” he said. “Oh, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, dads, dads, dads!” She drew him into the salon, where the family waited, a boy and girl

his daughter’s age, his sister-in-law and her husband. He greeted Marion with his voice pitched carefully to avoid either feigned enthusiasm or dis- like, but her response was more frankly tepid, though she minimized her expression of unalterable distrust by directing her regard toward his child. The two men clasped hands in a friendly way and Lincoln Peters rested his for a moment on Charlie’s shoulder.

The room was warm and comfortably American. The three children moved intimately about, playing through the yellow oblongs that led to other rooms; the cheer of six o’clock spoke in the eager smacks of the fire and the sounds of French activity in the kitchen. But Charlie did not relax; his heart sat up rigidly in his body and he drew confidence from his daughter, who from time to time came close to him, holding in her arms the doll he had brought.

“Really extremely well,” he declared in answer to Lincoln’s question. “There’s a lot of business there that isn’t moving at all, but we’re doing even better than ever. In fact, damn well. I’m bringing my sister over from America next month to keep house for me. My income last year was bigger than it was when I had money. You see, the Czechs—”

His boasting was for a specific purpose; but after a moment, seeing a faint restiveness in Lincoln’s eye, he changed the subject:

“Those are fine children of yours, well brought up, good manners.” “We think Honoria’s a great little girl too.” Marion Peters came back from the kitchen. She was a tall woman with

worried eyes, who had once possessed a fresh American loveliness. Charlie had never been sensitive to it and was always surprised when people spoke of how pretty she had been. From the first there had been an instinctive antipathy between them.

“Well, how do you find Honoria?” she asked.

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“Wonderful. I was astonished how much she’s grown in ten months. All the children are looking well.”

“We haven’t had a doctor for a year. How do you like being back in Paris?” “It seems very funny to see so few Americans around.” “I’m delighted,” Marion said vehemently. “Now at least you can go

into a store without their assuming you’re a millionaire. We’ve suffered like everybody, but on the whole it’s a good deal pleasanter.”

“But it was nice while it lasted,” Charlie said. “We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar this afternoon”—he stumbled, seeing his mistake—“there wasn’t a man I knew.”

She looked at him keenly. “I should think you’d have had enough of bars.” “I only stayed a minute. I take one drink every afternoon, and no more.” “Don’t you want a cocktail before dinner?” Lincoln asked. “I take only one drink every afternoon, and I’ve had that.” “I hope you keep to it,” said Marion. Her dislike was evident in the coldness with which she spoke, but

Charlie only smiled; he had larger plans. Her very aggressiveness gave him an advantage, and he knew enough to wait. He wanted them to initiate the discussion of what they knew had brought him to Paris.

At dinner he couldn’t decide whether Honoria was most like him or her mother. Fortunate if she didn’t combine the traits of both that had brought them to disaster. A great wave of protectiveness went over him. He thought he knew what to do for her. He believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out.

He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin° for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker° go through her chocolate arabesques.

After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were a few people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of cabarets, and cocottes° prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes. He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop’s, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside. Immediately an eager orchestra burst into sound, a pair of professional dancers leaped to their feet and a maître d’hôtel swooped toward him, crying, “Crowd just arriving, sir!” But he withdrew quickly.

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strapontin: an aisle seat Josephine Baker: well-known African American dancer cocottes: prostitutes

FITZGERALD / BABYLON REVISITED 203

“You have to be damn drunk,” he thought. Zelli’s was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding it

were dark; up in the Rue Blanche there was more light and a local, col- loquial French crowd. The Poet’s Cave had disappeared, but the two great mouths of the Café of Heaven and the Café of Hell still yawned—even devoured, as he watched, the meager contents of a tourist bus—a German, a Japanese, and an American couple who glanced at him with frightened eyes.

So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word “dissipate”—to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.

He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab.

But it hadn’t been given for nothing. It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering

to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remember- ing, the things that now he would always remember—his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

In the glare of a brasserie° a woman spoke to him. He bought her some eggs and coffee, and then, eluding her encouraging stare, gave her a twenty-franc note and took a taxi to his hotel.

2 He woke upon a fine fall day—football weather. The depression of

yesterday was gone and he liked the people on the streets. At noon he sat opposite Honoria at Le Grand Vatel, the only restaurant he could think of not reminiscent of champagne dinners and long luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred and vague twilight.

“Now, how about vegetables? Oughtn’t you to have some vegetables?” “Well, yes.” “Here’s épinards and chou-fleur and carrots and haricots.”°

“I’d like chou-fleur.” “Wouldn’t you like to have two vegetables?” “I usually only have one at lunch.” The waiter was pretending to be inordinately fond of children. “Qu’elle

est mignonne la petite! Elle parle exactement comme une Française.”°

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brasserie: small bar-restaurant épinards, chou-fleur, haricots: spinach, cauliflower, beans “Qu’elle . . . Française”: “What a precious little girl! She speaks exactly like a French child!”

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“How about dessert? Shall we wait and see?” The waiter disappeared. Honoria looked at her father expectantly. “What are we going to do?” “First, we’re going to that toy store in the Rue Saint-Honoré and

buy you anything you like. And then we’re going to the vaudeville at the Empire.”

She hesitated. “I like it about the vaudeville, but not the toy store.” “Why not?” “Well, you brought me this doll.” She had it with her. “And I’ve got

lots of things. And we’re not rich any more, are we?” “We never were. But today you are to have anything you want.” “All right,” she agreed resignedly. When there had been her mother and a French nurse he had been

inclined to be strict; now he extended himself, reached out for a new tolerance; he must be both parents to her and not shut any of her out of communication.

“I want to get to know you,” he said gravely. “First let me introduce myself. My name is Charles J. Wales, of Prague.”

“Oh, daddy!” her voice cracked with laughter. “And who are you, please?” he persisted, and she accepted a rôle imme-

diately: “Honoria Wales, Rue Palatine, Paris.” “Married or single?” “No, not married. Single.” He indicated the doll. “But I see you have a child, madame.” Unwilling to disinherit it, she took it to her heart and thought quickly:

“Yes, I’ve been married, but I’m not married now. My husband is dead.” He went on quickly, “And the child’s name?” “Simone. That’s after my best friend at school.” “I’m very pleased that you’re doing so well at school.” “I’m third this month,” she boasted. “Elsie”—that was her cousin—“is

only about eighteenth, and Richard is about at the bottom.” “You like Richard and Elsie, don’t you?” “Oh, yes. I like Richard quite well and I like her all right.” Cautiously and casually he asked: “And Aunt Marion and Uncle

Lincoln—which do you like best?” “Oh, Uncle Lincoln, I guess.” He was increasingly aware of her presence. As they came in, a murmur

of “. . . adorable” followed them, and now the people at the next table bent all their silences upon her, staring as if she were something no more conscious than a flower.

“Why don’t I live with you?” she asked suddenly. “Because mamma’s dead?”

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“You must stay here and learn more French. It would have been hard for daddy to take care of you so well.”

“I don’t really need much taking care of any more. I do everything for myself.”

Going out of the restaurant, a man and a woman unexpectedly hailed him.

“Well, the old Wales!” “Hello there, Lorraine. . . . Dunc.” Sudden ghosts out of the past: Duncan Schaeffer, a friend from

college. Lorraine Quarrles, a lovely, pale blonde of thirty; one of a crowd who had helped them make months into days in the lavish times of three years ago.

“My husband couldn’t come this year,” she said, in answer to his question. “We’re poor as hell. So he gave me two hundred a month and told me I could do my worst on that. . . . This your little girl?”

“What about coming back and sitting down?” Duncan asked. “Can’t do it.” He was glad for an excuse. As always, he felt Lorraine’s

passionate, provocative attraction, but his own rhythm was different now. “Well, how about dinner?” she asked. “I’m not free. Give me your address and let me call you.” “Charlie, I believe you’re sober,” she said judicially. “I honestly believe

he’s sober, Dunc. Pinch him and see if he’s sober.” Charlie indicated Honoria with his head. They both laughed. “What’s your address?” said Duncan sceptically. He hesitated, unwilling to give the name of his hotel. “I’m not settled yet. I’d better call you. We’re going to see the vaudeville

at the Empire.” “There! That’s what I want to do,” Lorraine said. “I want to see some

clowns and acrobats and jugglers. That’s just what we’ll do, Dunc.” “We’ve got to do an errand first,” said Charlie. “Perhaps we’ll see

you there.” “All right, you snob. . . . Good-by, beautiful little girl.” “Good-by.” Honoria bobbed politely. Somehow, an unwelcome encounter. They liked him because he was

functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him, because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted to draw a certain sustenance from his strength.

At the Empire, Honoria proudly refused to sit upon her father’s folded coat. She was already an individual with a code of her own, and Charlie was more and more absorbed by the desire of putting a little of himself into her before she crystallized utterly. It was hopeless to try to know her in so short a time.

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Between the acts they came upon Duncan and Lorraine in the lobby where the band was playing.

“Have a drink?” “All right, but not up at the bar. We’ll take a table.” “The perfect father.” Listening abstractedly to Lorraine, Charlie watched Honoria’s eyes

leave their table, and he followed them wistfully about the room, wonder- ing what they saw. He met her glance and she smiled.

“I liked that lemonade,” she said. What had she said? What had he expected? Going home in a taxi

afterward, he pulled her over until her head rested against his chest. “Darling, do you ever think about your mother?” “Yes, sometimes,” she answered vaguely. “I don’t want you to forget her. Have you got a picture of her?” “Yes, I think so. Anyhow, Aunt Marion has. Why don’t you want me

to forget her?” “She loved you very much.” “I loved her too.” They were silent for a moment. “Daddy, I want to come and live with you,” she said suddenly. His heart leaped; he had wanted it to come like this. “Aren’t you perfectly happy?” “Yes, but I love you better than anybody. And you love me better than

anybody, don’t you, now that mummy’s dead?” “Of course I do. But you won’t always like me best, honey. You’ll grow

up and meet somebody your own age and go marry him and forget you ever had a daddy.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she agreed tranquilly. He didn’t go in. He was coming back at nine o’clock and he wanted to

keep himself fresh and new for the thing he must say then. “When you’re safe inside, just show yourself in that window.” “All right. Good-by, dads, dads, dads, dads.” He waited in the dark street until she appeared, all warm and glowing,

in the window above and kissed her fingers out into the night.

3 They were waiting. Marion sat behind the coffee service in a dignified

black dinner dress that just faintly suggested mourning. Lincoln was walk- ing up and down with the animation of one who had already been talking. They were as anxious as he was to get into the question. He opened it almost immediately:

“I suppose you know what I want to see you about—why I really came to Paris.”

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Marion played with the black stars on her necklace and frowned. “I’m awfully anxious to have a home,” he continued. “And I’m awfully

anxious to have Honoria in it. I appreciate your taking in Honoria for her mother’s sake, but things have changed now”—he hesitated and then con- tinued more forcibly—“changed radically with me, and I want to ask you to reconsider the matter. It would be silly for me to deny that about three years ago I was acting badly—”

Marion looked up at him with hard eyes. “—but all that’s over. As I told you, I haven’t had more than a drink

a day for over a year, and I take that drink deliberately, so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination. You see the idea?”

“No,” said Marion succinctly. “It’s a sort of stunt I set myself. It keeps the matter in proportion.” “I get you,” said Lincoln. “You don’t want to admit it’s got any attrac-

tion for you.” “Something like that. Sometimes I forget and don’t take it. But I try

to take it. Anyhow, I couldn’t afford to drink in my position. The people I represent are more than satisfied with what I’ve done, and I’m bringing my sister over from Burlington to keep house for me, and I want awfully to have Honoria too. You know that even when her mother and I weren’t getting along well we never let anything that happened touch Honoria. I know she’s fond of me and I know I’m able to take care of her and—well, there you are. How do you feel about it?”

He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated his inevi- table resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner, he might win his point in the end.

Keep your temper, he told himself. You don’t want to be justified. You want Honoria.

Lincoln spoke first: “We’ve been talking it over ever since we got your letter last month. We’re happy to have Honoria here. She’s a dear little thing, and we’re glad to be able to help her, but of course that isn’t the question—”

Marion interrupted suddenly. “How long are you going to stay sober, Charlie?” she asked.

“Permanently, I hope.” “How can anybody count on that?” “You know I never did drink heavily until I gave up business and

came over here with nothing to do. Then Helen and I began to run around with—”

“Please leave Helen out of it. I can’t bear to hear you talk about her like that.”

He stared at her grimly; he had never been certain how fond of each other the sisters were in life.

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“My drinking only lasted about a year and a half—from the time we came over until I—collapsed.”

“It was time enough.” “It was time enough,” he agreed. “My duty is entirely to Helen,” she said. “I try to think what she

would have wanted me to do. Frankly, from the night you did that ter- rible thing you haven’t really existed for me. I can’t help that. She was my sister.”

“Yes.” “When she was dying she asked me to look out for Honoria. If you

hadn’t been in a sanitarium then, it might have helped matters.” He had no answer. “I’ll never in my life be able to forget the morning when Helen

knocked at my door, soaked to the skin and shivering, and said you’d locked her out.”

Charlie gripped the sides of the chair. This was more difficult than he expected; he wanted to launch out into a long expostulation and explana- tion, but he only said: “The night I locked her out—” and she interrupted, “I don’t feel up to going over that again.”

After a moment’s silence Lincoln said: “We’re getting off the subject. You want Marion to set aside her legal guardianship and give you Honoria. I think the main point for her is whether she has confidence in you or not.”

“I don’t blame Marion,” Charlie said slowly, “but I think she can have entire confidence in me. I had a good record up to three years ago. Of course, it’s within human possibilities I might go wrong any time. But if we wait much longer I’ll lose Honoria’s childhood and my chance for a home.” He shook his head, “I’ll simply lose her, don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see,” said Lincoln. “Why didn’t you think of all this before?” Marion asked. “I suppose I did, from time to time, but Helen and I were getting along

badly. When I consented to the guardianship, I was flat on my back in a sanitarium and the market had cleaned me out. I knew I’d acted badly, and I thought if it would bring any peace to Helen, I’d agree to anything. But now it’s different. I’m functioning, I’m behaving damn well, so far as—”

“Please don’t swear at me,” Marion said. He looked at her, startled. With each remark the force of her dislike

became more and more apparent. She had built up all her fear of life into one wall and faced it toward him. This trivial reproof was possibly the result of some trouble with the cook several hours before. Charlie became increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later it would come out, in a word here, a shake of the head there, and some of that distrust would be irrevocably implanted in Honoria. But he

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pulled his temper down out of his face and shut it up inside him; he had won a point, for Lincoln realized the absurdity of Marion’s remark and asked her lightly since when she had objected to the word “damn.”

“Another thing,” Charlie said: “I’m able to give her certain advantages now. I’m going to take a French governess to Prague with me. I’ve got a lease on a new apartment—”

He stopped, realizing that he was blundering. They couldn’t be expected to accept with equanimity the fact that his income was again twice as large as their own.

“I suppose you can give her more luxuries than we can,” said Marion. “When you were throwing away money we were living along watching every ten francs. . . . I suppose you’ll start doing it again.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve learned. I worked hard for ten years, you know—until I got lucky in the market, like so many people. Terribly lucky. It didn’t seem any use working any more, so I quit. It won’t happen again.”

There was a long silence. All of them felt their nerves straining, and for the first time in a year Charlie wanted a drink. He was sure now that Lincoln Peters wanted him to have his child.

Marion shuddered suddenly; part of her saw that Charlie’s feet were planted on the earth now, and her own maternal feeling recognized the naturalness of his desire; but she had lived for a long time with a prejudice—a prejudice founded on a curious disbelief in her sister’s happiness, and which, in the shock of one terrible night, had turned to hatred for him. It had all happened at a point in her life where the discouragement of ill health and adverse circumstances made it necessary for her to believe in tangible villainy and a tangible villain.

“I can’t help what I think!” she cried out suddenly. “How much you were responsible for Helen’s death, I don’t know. It’s something you’ll have to square with your own conscience.”

An electric current of agony surged through him; for a moment he was almost on his feet, an unuttered sound echoing in his throat. He hung on to himself for a moment, another moment.

“Hold on there,” said Lincoln uncomfortably. “I never thought you were responsible for that.”

“Helen died of heart trouble,” Charlie said dully. “Yes, heart trouble.” Marion spoke as if the phrase had another mean-

ing for her. Then, in the flatness that followed her outburst, she saw him plainly

and she knew he had somehow arrived at control over the situation. Glanc- ing at her husband, she found no help from him, and as abruptly as if it were a matter of no importance, she threw up the sponge.

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“Do what you like!” she cried, springing up from her chair. “She’s your child. I’m not the person to stand in your way. I think if it were my child I’d rather see her—” She managed to check herself. “You two decide it. I can’t stand this. I’m sick. I’m going to bed.”

She hurried from the room; after a moment Lincoln said: “This has been a hard day for her. You know how strongly she feels—”

His voice was almost apologetic: “When a woman gets an idea in her head.” “Of course.” “It’s going to be all right. I think she sees now that you—can provide

for the child, and so we can’t very well stand in your way or Honoria’s way.” “Thank you, Lincoln.” “I’d better go along and see how she is.” “I’m going.” He was still trembling when he reached the street, but a walk down

the Rue Bonaparte to the quais° set him up, and as he crossed the Seine, fresh and new by the quai lamps, he felt exultant. But back in his room he couldn’t sleep. The image of Helen haunted him. Helen whom he had loved so until they had senselessly begun to abuse each other’s love, tear it into shreds. On that terrible February night that Marion remembered so vividly, a slow quarrel had gone on for hours. There was a scene at the Florida, and then he attempted to take her home, and then she kissed young Webb at a table; after that there was what she had hysterically said. When he arrived home alone he turned the key in the lock in wild anger. How could he know she would arrive an hour later alone, that there would be a snowstorm in which she wandered about in slippers, too confused to find a taxi? Then the aftermath, her escaping pneumonia by a miracle, and all the attendant horror. They were “reconciled,” but that was the beginning of the end, and Marion, who had seen with her own eyes and who imagined it to be one of many scenes from her sister’s martyrdom, never forgot.

Going over it again brought Helen nearer, and in the white, soft light that steals upon half sleep near morning he found himself talking to her again. She said that he was perfectly right about Honoria and that she wanted Honoria to be with him. She said she was glad he was being good and doing better. She said a lot of other things—very friendly things—but she was in a swing in a white dress, and swinging faster and faster all the time, so that at the end he could not hear clearly all that she said.

4 He woke up feeling happy. The door of the world was open again.

He made plans, vistas, futures for Honoria and himself, but suddenly he

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grew sad, remembering all the plans he and Helen had made. She had not planned to die. The present was the thing—work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life.

It was another bright, crisp day. He called Lincoln Peters at the bank where he worked and asked if he could count on taking Honoria when he left for Prague. Lincoln agreed that there was no reason for delay. One thing—the legal guardianship. Marion wanted to retain that a while longer. She was upset by the whole matter, and it would oil things if she felt that the situation was still in her control for another year. Charlie agreed, wanting only the tangible, visible child.

Then the question of a governess. Charlie sat in a gloomy agency and talked to a cross Béarnaise and to a buxom Breton peasant, neither of whom he could have endured. There were others whom he would see tomorrow.

He lunched with Lincoln Peters at Griffon, trying to keep down his exultation.

“There’s nothing quite like your own child,” Lincoln said. “But you understand how Marion feels too.”

“She’s forgotten how hard I worked for seven years there,” Charlie said. “She just remembers one night.”

“There’s another thing.” Lincoln hesitated. “While you and Helen were tearing around Europe throwing money away, we were just get- ting along. I didn’t touch any of the prosperity because I never got ahead enough to carry anything but my insurance. I think Marion felt there was some kind of injustice in it—you not even working toward the end, and getting richer and richer.”

“It went just as quick as it came,” said Charlie. “Yes, a lot of it stayed in the hands of chasseurs and saxophone play-

ers and maîtres d’hôtel—well, the big party’s over now. I just said that to explain Marion’s feeling about those crazy years. If you drop in about six o’clock tonight before Marion’s too tired, we’ll settle the details on the spot.”

Back at his hotel, Charlie found a pneumatique° that had been redi- rected from the Ritz bar where Charlie had left his address for the purpose of finding a certain man.

dear charlie: You were so strange when we saw you the other day that I wondered if I did something to offend you. If so, I’m not conscious of it. In fact, I have thought about you too much

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for the last year, and it’s always been in the back of my mind that I might see you if I came over here. We did have such good times that crazy spring, like the night you and I stole the butcher’s tricycle, and the time we tried to call on the president and you had the old derby rim and the wire cane. Everybody seems so old lately, but I don’t feel old a bit. Couldn’t we get together some time today for old time’s sake? I’ve got a vile hang-over for the moment, but will be feeling better this afternoon and will look for you about five in the sweat-shop at the Ritz.

Always devotedly, Lorraine

His first feeling was one of awe that he had actually, in his mature years, stolen a tricycle and pedalled Lorraine all over the Étoile between the small hours and dawn. In retrospect it was a nightmare. Locking out Helen didn’t fit in with any other act of his life, but the tricycle incident did—it was one of many. How many weeks or months of dissipation to arrive at that condition of utter irresponsibility?

He tried to picture how Lorraine had appeared to him then—very attractive; Helen was unhappy about it, though she said nothing. Yesterday, in the restaurant, Lorraine had seemed trite, blurred, worn away. He emphatically did not want to see her, and he was glad Alix had not given away his hotel address. It was a relief to think, instead, of Honoria, to think of Sundays spent with her and of saying good morning to her and of knowing she was there in his house at night, drawing her breath in the darkness.

At five he took a taxi and bought presents for all the Peters—a piquant cloth doll, a box of Roman soldiers, flowers for Marion, big linen handker- chiefs for Lincoln.

He saw, when he arrived in the apartment, that Marion had accepted the inevitable. She greeted him now as though he were a recalcitrant member of the family, rather than a menacing outsider. Honoria had been told she was going; Charlie was glad to see that her tact made her conceal her excessive happiness. Only on his lap did she whisper her delight and the question “When?” before she slipped away with the other children.

He and Marion were alone for a minute in the room, and on an impulse he spoke out boldly:

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material. I wish you and I could be on better terms.”

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“Some things are hard to forget,” she answered. “It’s a question of confidence.” There was no answer to this and presently she asked, “When do you propose to take her?”

“As soon as I can get a governess. I hoped the day after tomorrow.” “That’s impossible. I’ve got to get her things in shape. Not before Saturday.” He yielded. Coming back into the room, Lincoln offered him a drink. “I’ll take my daily whisky,” he said. It was warm here, it was a home, people together by a fire. The chil-

dren felt very safe and important; the mother and father were serious, watchful. They had things to do for the children more important than his visit here. A spoonful of medicine was, after all, more important than the strained relations between Marion and himself. They were not dull people, but they were very much in the grip of life and circumstances. He wondered if he couldn’t do something to get Lincoln out of his rut at the bank.

A long peal at the door-bell; the bonne à tout faire° passed through and went down the corridor. The door opened upon another long ring, and then voices, and the three in the salon looked up expectantly; Lincoln moved to bring the corridor within his range of vision, and Marion rose. Then the maid came back along the corridor, closely followed by the voices, which developed under the light into Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles.

They were gay, they were hilarious, they were roaring with laughter. For a moment Charlie was astounded; unable to understand how they ferreted out the Peters’ address.

“Ah-h-h!” Duncan wagged his finger roguishly at Charlie. “Ah-h-h!” They both slid down another cascade of laughter. Anxious and at

a loss, Charlie shook hands with them quickly and presented them to Lincoln and Marion. Marion nodded, scarcely speaking. She had drawn back a step toward the fire; her little girl stood beside her, and Marion put an arm about her shoulder.

With growing annoyance at the intrusion, Charlie waited for them to explain themselves. After some concentration Duncan said:

“We came to invite you out to dinner. Lorraine and I insist that all this chi-chi, cagy business ’bout your address got to stop.”

Charlie came closer to them, as if to force them backward down the corridor.

“Sorry, but I can’t. Tell me where you’ll be and I’ll phone you in half an hour.”

This made no impression. Lorraine sat down suddenly on the side of a chair, and focussing her eyes on Richard, cried, “Oh, what a nice little boy! Come here, little boy.” Richard glanced at his mother, but did

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not move. With a perceptible shrug of her shoulders, Lorraine turned back to Charlie:

“Come and dine. Sure your cousins won’ mine. See you so sel’om. Or solemn.”

“I can’t,” said Charlie sharply. “You two have dinner and I’ll phone you.” Her voice became suddenly unpleasant. “All right, we’ll go. But I

remember once when you hammered on my door at four a.m. I was enough of a good sport to give you a drink. Come on, Dunc.”

Still in slow motion, with blurred, angry faces, with uncertain feet, they retired along the corridor.

“Good night,” Charlie said. “Good night!” responded Lorraine emphatically. When he went back into the salon Marion had not moved, only now

her son was standing in the circle of her other arm. Lincoln was still swing- ing Honoria back and forth like a pendulum from side to side.

“What an outrage!” Charlie broke out. “What an absolute outrage!” Neither of them answered. Charlie dropped into an armchair, picked

up his drink, set it down again and said: “People I haven’t seen for two years having the colossal nerve—” He broke off. Marion had made the sound “Oh!” in one swift, furious

breath, turned her body from him with a jerk and left the room. Lincoln set down Honoria carefully. “You children go in and start your soup,” he said, and when they

obeyed, he said to Charlie: “Marion’s not well and she can’t stand shocks. That kind of people

make her really physically sick.” “I didn’t tell them to come here. They wormed your name out of some-

body. They deliberately—” “Well, it’s too bad. It doesn’t help matters. Excuse me a minute.” Left alone, Charlie sat tense in his chair. In the next room he could hear

the children eating, talking in monosyllables, already oblivious to the scene between their elders. He heard a murmur of conversation from a farther room and then the ticking bell of a telephone receiver picked up, and in a panic he moved to the other side of the room and out of earshot.

In a minute Lincoln came back. “Look here, Charlie. I think we’d better call off dinner for tonight. Marion’s in bad shape.”

“Is she angry with me?” “Sort of,” he said, almost roughly. “She’s not strong and—” “You mean she’s changed her mind about Honoria?” “She’s pretty bitter right now. I don’t know. You phone me at the bank

tomorrow.” “I wish you’d explain to her I never dreamed these people would come

here. I’m just as sore as you are.”

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“I couldn’t explain anything to her now.” Charlie got up. He took his coat and hat and started down the corridor.

Then he opened the door of the dining room and said in a strange voice, “Good night, children.”

Honoria rose and ran around the table to hug him. “Good night, sweetheart,” he said vaguely, and then trying to make

his voice more tender, trying to conciliate something, “Good night, dear children.”

5 Charlie went directly to the Ritz bar with the furious idea of finding

Lorraine and Duncan, but they were not there, and he realized that in any case there was nothing he could do. He had not touched his drink at the Peters’, and now he ordered a whisky-and-soda. Paul came over to say hello.

“It’s a great change,” he said sadly. “We do about half the business we did. So many fellows I hear about back in the States lost everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the second. Your friend George Hardt lost every cent, I hear. Are you back in the States?”

“No, I’m in business in Prague.” “I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.” “I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the

boom.” “Selling short.” “Something like that.” Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare—

the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn’t add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship’s party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places—

—The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

He went to the phone and called the Peters’ apartment; Lincoln answered.

“I called up because this thing is on my mind. Has Marion said any- thing definite?”

“Marion’s sick,” Lincoln answered shortly. “I know this thing isn’t altogether your fault, but I can’t have her go to pieces about it. I’m afraid we’ll have to let it slide for six months; I can’t take the chance of working her up to this state again.”

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“I see.” “I’m sorry, Charlie.” He went back to his table. His whisky glass was empty, but he shook

his head when Alix looked at it questioningly. There wasn’t much he could do now except send Honoria some things; he would send her a lot of things tomorrow. He thought rather angrily that this was just money—he had given so many people money. . . .

“No, no more,” he said to another waiter. “What do I owe you?” He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But

he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Contrast Charlie’s past life in Paris with his present circumstances. How does this contrast between his past and present relate to the theme of the story? Describe the theme as precisely as possible.

2. How has Charlie’s character changed from past years when he lived in Paris with his wife, Helen? Is his reform authentic or feigned?

3. How is Charlie’s daughter characterized? Is she similar to or different from her father? 4. Why is the Paris setting important? What details does Fitzgerald employ to bring

the setting to life? 5. Describe the plot structure of the story. What is the central conflict? When does

the action reach a dramatic climax? 6. Discuss the importance of Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles to the story.

Why are they included? 7. Is Marion Peters a sympathetic character? Why or why not? 8. Analyze the story’s conclusion. Is the ending happy, unhappy, or indeterminate?

ANTON CHEKHOV

The Darling Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor, Plemyanniakov,

was sitting in her back porch, lost in thought. It was hot, the flies were persistent and teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering from the east, and bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in the air.

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THE DARLING First published in 1898. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was raised in semi-poverty in the town of Taganrog, on the Black Sea. A scholarship enabled him to take a medical degree from Moscow University, but writing plays, stories, and sketches was his main source of income. Along with James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, Chekhov is considered one of the founders of the modern short story.

CHEKHOV / THE DARLING 217

Kukin, who was the manager of an open air theater called the Tivoli, and who lived in the lodge, was standing in the middle of the garden looking at the sky.

“Again!” he observed despairingly. “It’s going to rain again! Rain every day, as though to spite me. I might as well hang myself! It’s ruin! Fearful losses everyday.”

He flung up his hands, and went on, addressing Olenka: “There! that’s the life we lead, Olga Semyonovna. It’s enough to make

one cry. One works and does one’s utmost; one wears oneself out, getting no sleep at night, and racks one’s brain what to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one’s public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music hall artists. But do you suppose that’s what they want! They don’t understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and it’s kept it up all May and June. It’s simply awful! The public doesn’t come, but I’ve to pay the rent just the same, and pay the artists.”

The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Kukin would say with an hysterical laugh:

“Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck in this world and the next! Let the artists have me up!° Send me to prison!— to Siberia!— the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!”

And next day the same thing. Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came

into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and curls combed forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her. She was always fond of some- one, and could not exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had loved her aunt who used to come every other year from Bryansk; and before that, when she was at school, she had loved her French master. She was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind, naive smile, which came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, “Yes, not half bad,” and smiled too, while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, “You darling!”

The house in which she had lived from her birth upwards, and which was left her in her father’s will, was at the extreme end of the town, not

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far from the Tivoli. In the evenings and at night she could hear the band playing, and the crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin struggling with his destiny, storming the entrenchments of his chief foe, the indifferent public; there was a sweet thrill at her heart, she had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at daybreak, she tapped softly at her bedroom window, and showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, she gave him a friendly smile. . . .

He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hands, and said:

“You darling!” He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding,

his face still retained an expression of despair. They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to look

after things in the Tivoli, to put down the accounts and pay the wages. And her rosy cheeks, her sweet, naive, radiant smile, were to be seen now at the office window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the scenes of the theater. And already she used to say to her acquaintances that the theater was the chief and most important thing in life, and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.

“But do you suppose the public understands that?” she used to say. “What they want is a clown. Yesterday we gave ‘Faust Inside Out,’ and almost all the boxes were empty; but if Vanitchka and I had been produc- ing some vulgar thing, I assure you the theater would have been packed. Tomorrow Vanitchka and I are doing ‘Orpheus in Hell.’ Do come.”

And what Kukin said about the theater and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the behavior of the musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor’s office to set things right.

The actors were fond of her and used to call her “Vanitchka and I,” and “the darling”; she was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums of money, and if they deceived her, she used to shed a few tears in private, but did not complain to her husband.

They got on well in the winter too. They took the theater in the town for the whole winter, and let it for short terms to a Little Russian° com- pany, or to a conjurer, or to a local dramatic society. Olenka grew stouter, and was almost always beaming with satisfaction, while Kukin grew thinner and yellower, and continually complained of their terrible losses,

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Little Russian: Ukrainian

although he had not done badly all the winter. He used to cough at night, and she used to give him hot raspberry tea or lime-flower water, to rub him with eau de Cologne and to wrap him in her warm shawls.

“You’re such a sweet pet!” she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking his hair. “You’re such a pretty dear!”

Towards Lent he went to Moscow to collect a new troupe, and without him she could not sleep, but sat all night at her window, looking at the stars, and she compared herself with the hens, who are awake all night and uneasy when the cock is not in the hen house. Kukin was detained in Moscow, and wrote that he would be back at Easter, adding some instruc- tions about the Tivoli. But on the Sunday before Easter, late in the evening, came a sudden ominous knock at the gate; someone was hammering on the gate as though on a barrel—boom, boom, boom! The drowsy cook went flopping with her bare feet through the puddles, as she ran to open the gate.

“Please open,” said someone outside in a thick bass. “There is a tele- gram for you.”

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time for some reason she felt numb with terror. With shaking hands she opened the telegram and read as follows:

“Ivan Petrovitch died suddenly today. Awaiting immate instructions fufuneral Tuesday.”

That was how it was written in the telegram— “fufuneral,” and the utterly incomprehensible word “immate.” It was signed by the stage man- ager of the operatic company.

“My darling!” sobbed Olenka. “Vanitchka, my precious, my darling! Why did I ever meet you! Why did I know you and love you! Your poor heartbroken Olenka is all alone without you!”

Kukin’s funeral took place on Tuesday in Moscow, Olenka returned home on Wednesday, and as soon as she got indoors she threw herself on her bed and sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door, and in the street.

“Poor darling!” the neighbors said, as they crossed themselves. “Olga Semyonovna, poor darling! How she does take on!”

Three months later Olenka was coming home from mass, melancholy and in deep mourning. It happened that one of her neighbors, Vassily Andreitch Pustovalov, returning home from church, walked back beside her. He was the manager at Babakayev’s, the timber merchant’s. He wore a straw hat, a white waistcoat, and a gold watch chain, and looked more like a country gentleman than a man in trade.

“Everything happens as it is ordained, Olga Semyonovna,” he said gravely, with a sympathetic note in his voice; “and if any of our dear ones

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die, it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought to have fortitude and bear it submissively.”

After seeing Olenka to her gate, he said goodbye and went on. All day afterwards she heard his sedately dignified voice, and whenever she shut her eyes she saw his dark beard. She liked him very much. And apparently she had made an impression on him too, for not long afterwards an elderly lady, with whom she was only slightly acquainted, came to drink coffee with her, and as soon as she was seated at table began to talk about Pustovalov, saying that he was an excellent man whom one could thoroughly depend upon, and that any girl would be glad to marry him. Three days later Pustovalov came himself. He did not stay long, only about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left, Olenka loved him—loved him so much that she lay awake all night in a perfect fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was quickly arranged, and then came the wedding.

Pustovalov and Olenka got on very well together when they were married.

Usually he sat in the office till dinner° time, then he went out on busi- ness, while Olenka took his place, and sat in the office till evening, making up accounts and booking orders.

“Timber gets dearer every year; the price rises twenty percent,” she would say to her customers and friends. “Only fancy we used to sell local timber, and now Vassitchka always has to go for wood to the Mogilev dis- trict. And the freight!” she would add, covering her cheeks with her hands in horror. “The freight!”

It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages, and that the most important and necessary thing in life was timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sound of words such as “baulk,” “post,” “beam,” “pole,” “scantling,” “batten,” “lath,” “plank,” etc.

At night when she was asleep she dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber somewhere far away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of six-inch beams forty feet high, standing on end, was marching upon the timber yard; that logs, beams, and boards knocked together with the resounding crash of dry wood, kept falling and getting up again, piling themselves on each other. Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her tenderly: “Olenka, what’s the matter, darling? Cross yourself!”

Her husband’s ideas were hers. If he thought the room was too hot, or that business was slack, she thought the same. Her husband did not care for entertainments, and on holidays he stayed at home. She did likewise.

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dinner: the midday meal

“You are always at home or in the office,” her friends said to her. “You should go to the theater, darling, or to the circus.”

“Vassitchka and I have no time to go to theaters,” she would answer sedately. “We have no time for nonsense. What’s the use of these theaters?”

On Saturdays Pustovalov and she used to go to the evening service; on holidays to early mass, and they walked side by side with softened faces as they came home from church. There was a pleasant fragrance about them both, and her silk dress rustled agreeably. At home they drank tea, with fancy bread and jams of various kinds, and afterwards they ate pie. Every day at twelve o’clock there was a savory smell of beet-root soup and of mutton or duck in their yard, and on fast days of fish, and no one could pass the gate without feeling hungry. In the office the samovar was always boiling, and customers were regaled with tea and cracknels.° Once a week the couple went to the baths and returned side by side, both red in the face.

“Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God,” Olenka used to say to her acquaintances. “I wish everyone were as well off as Vassitchka and I.”

When Pustovalov went away to buy wood in the Mogilev district, she missed him dreadfully, lay awake and cried. A young veterinary surgeon in the army, called Smirnin, to whom they had let their lodge, used some- times to come in the evening. He used to talk to her and play cards with her, and this entertained her in her husband’s absence. She was particularly interested in what he told her of his home life. He was married and had a little boy, but was separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her and used to send her forty rubles a month for the maintenance of their son. And hearing of all this, Olenka sighed and shook her head. She was sorry for him.

“Well, God keep you,” she used to say to him at parting, as she lighted him down the stairs with a candle. “Thank you for coming to cheer me up, and may the Mother of God give you health.”

And she always expressed herself with the same sedateness and dignity, the same reasonableness, in imitation of her husband. As the veterinary surgeon was disappearing behind the door below, she would say:

“You know, Vladimir Platonitch, you’d better make it up with your wife. You should forgive her for the sake of your son. You may be sure the little fellow understands.”

And when Pustovalov came back, she told him in a low voice about the veterinary surgeon and his unhappy home life, and both sighed and shook their heads and talked about the boy, who, no doubt, missed his father, and by some strange connection of ideas, they went up to the holy icons, bowed to the ground before them and prayed that God would give them children.

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And so the Pustovalovs lived for six years quietly and peaceably in love and complete harmony.

But behold! one winter day after drinking hot tea in the office, Vassily Andreitch went out into the yard without his cap on to see about sending off some timber, caught cold and was taken ill. He had the best doctors, but he grew worse and died after four months’ illness. And Olenka was a widow once more.

“I’ve nobody, now you’ve left me, my darling,” she sobbed, after her husband’s funeral. “How can I live without you, in wretchedness and misery! Pity me, good people, all alone in the world!”

She went about dressed in black with long “weepers,”° and gave up wearing hat and gloves for good. She hardly ever went out, except to church, or to her husband’s grave, and led the life of a nun. It was not till six months later that she took off the weepers and opened the shutters of the windows. She was sometimes seen in the mornings, going with her cook to market for provisions, but what went on in her house and how she lived now could only be surmised. People guessed, from seeing her drink- ing tea in her garden with the veterinary surgeon, who read the newspaper aloud to her, and from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at the post office, she said to her:

“There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town, and that’s the cause of all sorts of epidemics. One is always hearing of people’s getting infection from the milk supply, or catching diseases from horses and cows. The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings.”

She repeated the veterinary surgeon’s words, and was of the same opin- ion as he about everything. It was evident that she could not live a year without some attachment, and had found new happiness in the lodge. In anyone else this would have been censured, but no one could think ill of Olenka; everything she did was so natural. Neither she nor the veterinary surgeon said anything to other people of the change in their relations, and tried, indeed, to conceal it, but without success, for Olenka could not keep a secret. When he had visitors, men serving in his regiment, and she poured out tea or served the supper, she would begin talking of the cattle plague, of the foot and mouth disease, and of the municipal slaughter- houses. He was dreadfully embarrassed, and when the guests had gone, he would seize her by the hand and hiss angrily:

“I’ve asked you before not to talk about what you don’t understand. When we veterinary surgeons are talking among ourselves, please don’t put your word in. It’s really annoying.”

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“weepers”: white cuffs indicating mourning

And she would look at him with astonishment and dismay, and ask him in alarm: “But, Voloditchka, what am I to talk about?”

And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him, begging him not to be angry, and they were both happy.

But this happiness did not last long. The veterinary surgeon departed, departed forever with his regiment, when it was transferred to a distant place—to Siberia, it may be. And Olenka was left alone.

Now she was absolutely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his armchair lay in the attic, covered with dust and lame of one leg. She got thinner and plainer, and when people met her in the street they did not look at her as they used to, and did not smile to her; evidently her best years were over and left behind, and now a new sort of life had begun for her, which did not bear thinking about. In the evening Olenka sat in the porch, and heard the band playing and the fireworks popping in the Tivoli, but now the sound stirred no response. She looked into her yard without interest, thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and afterwards, when night came on she went to bed and dreamed of her empty yard. She ate and drank as it were unwillingly.

And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions! One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain, or a peasant driving in his cart, but what the bottle is for, or the rain, or the peasant, and what is the meaning of it, one can’t say, and could not even for a thousand rubles. When she had Kukin, or Pustovalov, or the veterinary surgeon, Olenka could explain everything, and give her opinion about any- thing you like, but now there was the same emptiness in her brain and in her heart as there was in her yard outside. And it was as harsh and as bitter as wormwood in the mouth.

Little by little the town grew in all directions. The road became a street, and where the Tivoli and the timber yard had been, there were new turnings and houses. How rapidly time passes! Olenka’s house grew dingy, the roof got nasty, the shed sank on one side, and the whole yard was over- grown with docks and stinging nettles. Olenka herself had grown plain and elderly; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul, as before, was empty and dreary and full of bitterness. In winter she sat at her window and looked at the snow. When she caught the scent of spring, or heard the chime of the church bells, a sudden rush of memories from the past came over her, there was a tender ache in her heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears; but this was only for a minute, and then came emptiness again and the sense of the futility of life. The black kitten, Briska, rubbed against her and purred softly, but Olenka was not touched by these feline caresses.

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That was not what she needed. She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason—that would give her ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood. And she would shake the kitten off her skirt and say with vexation:

“Get along; I don’t want you!” And so it was, day after day and year after year, and no joy, and no

opinions. Whatever Mavra, the cook, said she accepted. One hot July day, towards evening, just as the cattle were being driven

away, and the whole yard was full of dust, someone suddenly knocked at the gate. Olenka went to open it herself and was dumbfounded when she looked out: she saw Smirnin, the veterinary surgeon, gray headed, and dressed as a civilian. She suddenly remembered everything. She could not help crying and letting her head fall on his breast without uttering a word, and in the violence of her feeling she did not notice how they both walked into the house and sat down to tea.

“My dear Vladimir Platonitch! What fate has brought you?” she mut- tered, trembling with joy.

“I want to settle here for good, Olga Semyonovna,” he told her. “I have resigned my post, and have come to settle down and try my luck on my own account. Besides, it’s time for my boy to go to school. He’s a big boy. I am reconciled with my wife, you know.”

“Where is she?” asked Olenka. “She’s at the hotel with the boy, and I’m looking for lodgings.” “Good gracious, my dear soul! Lodgings? Why not have my house?

Why shouldn’t that suit you? Why, my goodness, I wouldn’t take any rent!” cried Olenka in a flutter, beginning to cry again. “You live here, and the lodge will do nicely for me. Oh dear! how glad I am!”

Next day the roof was painted and the walls were whitewashed, and Olenka, with her arms akimbo, walked about the yard giving directions. Her face was beaming with her old smile, and she was brisk and alert as though she had waked from a long sleep. The veterinary’s wife arrived— a thin, plain lady, with short hair and a peevish expression. With her was her little Sasha, a boy of ten, small for his age, blue-eyed, chubby, with dimples in his cheeks. And scarcely had the boy walked into the yard when he ran after the cat, and at once there was the sound of his gay, joyous laugh.

“Is that your puss, auntie?” he asked Olenka. “When she has little ones, do give us a kitten. Mamma is awfully afraid of mice.”

Olenka talked to him, and gave him tea. Her heart warmed and there was a sweet ache in her bosom, as though the boy had been her own child. And when he sat at the table in the evening, going over his lessons, she looked at him with deep tenderness and pity as she murmured to herself:

“You pretty pet! . . . my precious! . . . Such a fair little thing, and so clever.”

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“‘An island is a piece of land which is entirely surrounded by water,’” he read aloud.

“An island is a piece of land,” she repeated, and this was the first opinion to which she gave utterance with positive conviction after so many years of silence and dearth of ideas.

Now she had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked to Sasha’s parents, saying how difficult the lessons were at the high schools, but that yet the high school was better than a commercial one, since with a high school education all careers were open to one, such as being a doctor or an engineer.

Sasha began going to the high school. His mother departed to Harkov to her sister’s and did not return; his father used to go off every day to inspect cattle, and would often be away from home for three days together, and it seemed to Olenka as though Sasha was entirely abandoned, that he was not wanted at home, that he was being starved, and she carried him off to her lodge and gave him a little room there.

And for six months Sasha had lived in the lodge with her. Every morn- ing Olenka came into his bedroom and found him fast asleep, sleeping noiselessly with his hand under his cheek. She was sorry to wake him.

“Sashenka,” she would say mournfully, “get up, darling. It’s time for school.”

He would get up, dress and say his prayers, and then sit down to breakfast, drink three glasses of tea, and eat two large cracknels and half a buttered roll. All this time he was hardly awake and a little ill-humored in consequence.

“You don’t quite know your fable, Sashenka,” Olenka would say, look- ing at him as though he were about to set off on a long journey. “What a lot of trouble I have with you! You must work and do your best, darling, and obey your teachers.”

“Oh, do leave me alone!” Sasha would say. Then he would go down the street to school, a little figure, wearing a

big cap and carrying a satchel on his shoulder. Olenka would follow him noiselessly.

“Sashenka!” she would call after him, and she would pop into his hand a date or a caramel. When he reached the street where the school was, he would feel ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman; he would turn round and say:

“You’d better go home, auntie. I can go the rest of the way alone.” She would stand still and look after him fixedly till he had disappeared

at the school gate. Ah, how she loved him! Of her former attachments not one had been

so deep; never had her soul surrendered to any feeling so spontaneously, so disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts

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were aroused. For this little boy with the dimple in his cheek and the big school cap, she would have given her whole life, she would have given it with joy and tears of tenderness. Why? Who can tell why?

When she had seen the last of Sasha, she returned home, contented and serene, brimming over with love; her face, which had grown younger during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked at her with pleasure.

“Good morning, Olga Semyonovna, darling. How are you, darling?” “The lessons at the high school are very difficult now,” she would relate

at the market. “It’s too much; in the first class yesterday they gave him a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation and a problem. You know it’s too much for a little chap.”

And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons, and the school books, saying just what Sasha said.

At three o’clock they had dinner together: in the evening they learned their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed, she would stay a long time making the Cross over him and murmuring a prayer; then she would go to bed and dream of that faraway misty future when Sasha would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have a big house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and have children.  .  .  . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same thing, and tears would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes, while the black cat lay purring beside her: “Mrr, mrr, mrr.”

Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate. Olenka would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing.

Half a minute later would come another knock. “It must be a telegram from Harkov,” she would think, beginning

to tremble from head to foot. “Sasha’s mother is sending for him from Harkov. . . . Oh, mercy on us!”

She was in despair. Her head, her hands, and her feet would turn chill, and she would feel that she was the most unhappy woman in the world. But another minute would pass, voices would be heard: it would turn out to be the veterinary surgeon coming home from the club.

“Well, thank God!” she would think. And gradually the load in her heart would pass off, and she would feel

at ease. She would go back to bed thinking of Sasha, who lay sound asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep:

“I’ll give it you! Get away! Shut up!”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Analyze the characterization of Olenka. Is she admirable or unsympathetic? Are there passages in the text that can support either view? Cite the passages that support your own view of her character.

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2. Other than telling the story in chronological order, how does Chekhov provide structure to the narrative? How does the structure contribute to the meaning?

3. What is the significance of the ending, which focuses on a young boy rather than on one of Olenka’s husbands? How does this unexpected ending help emphasize the story’s theme?

4. Is Olenka a static or a developing character? Give specific evidence from the text for your opinion.

5. Discuss the use of humor in the story. Could it be argued that the humor makes the story more rather than less “serious” as an example of literary fiction?

6. Describe the theme of the story as precisely as possible.

EUDORA WELTY

A Worn Path It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out

in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.

Now and then there was a quivering in the thicket. Old Phoenix said, “Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons, and wild ani- mals! . . . Keep out from under these feet, little bobwhites. . . . Keep the big

a worn path First published in 1941. Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was raised and to which she returned after studying at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University. In the mid-1930s she was employed by the federal Work Projects Administration (WPA) to travel throughout Mississippi writing newspaper copy and taking photographs, a job that enabled her to observe many varieties of rural life in her native state.

Read, highlight, and take notes online.

228 CHAPTER FOUR / THEME

wild hogs out of my path. Don’t let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way.” Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.

On she went. The woods were deep and still. The sun made the pine needles almost too bright to look at, up where the wind rocked. The cones dropped as light as feathers. Down in the hollow was the mourning dove— it was not too late for him.

The path ran up a hill. “Seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,” she said, in the voice of argument old people keep to use with them- selves. “Something always take a hold of me on this hill—pleads I should stay.”

After she got to the top she turned and gave a full, severe look behind her where she had come. “Up through pines,” she said at length. “Now down through oaks.”

Her eyes opened their widest, and she started down gently. But before she got to the bottom of the hill a bush caught her dress.

Her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another. It was not possible to allow the dress to tear. “I in the thorny bush,” she said. “Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass, no sir. Old eyes thought you was a pretty little green bush.”

Finally, trembling all over, she stood free, and after a moment dared to stoop for her cane.

“Sun so high!” she cried, leaning back and looking, while the thick tears went over her eyes. “The time getting all gone here.”

At the foot of this hill was a place where a log was laid across the creek. “Now comes the trial,” said Phoenix. Putting her right foot out, she mounted the log and shut her eyes.

Lifting her skirt, leveling her cane fiercely before her, like a festival figure in some parade, she began to march across. Then she opened her eyes and she was safe on the other side.

“I wasn’t as old as I thought,” she said. But she sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bank around her

and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. “That would be acceptable,” she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air.

So she left that tree, and had to go through a barbed-wire fence. There she had to creep and crawl, spreading her knees and stretching her fingers like a baby trying to climb the steps. But she talked loudly to herself: she could not let her dress be torn now, so late in the day, and she could not pay for having her arm or her leg sawed off if she got caught fast where she was.

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At last she was safe through the fence and risen up out in the clearing. Big dead trees, like black men with one arm, were standing in the purple stalks of the withered cotton field. There sat a buzzard.

“Who you watching?” In the furrow she made her way along. “Glad this not the season for bulls,” she said, looking sideways, “and

the good Lord made his snakes to curl up and sleep in the winter. A plea- sure I don’t see no two-headed snake coming around that tree, where it come once. It took a while to get by him, back in the summer.”

She passed through the old cotton and went into a field of dead corn. It whispered and shook and was taller than her head. “Through the maze now,” she said, for there was no path.

Then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her. At first she took it for a man. It could have been a man dancing in the

field. But she stood still and listened, and it did not make a sound. It was as silent as a ghost.

“Ghost,” she said sharply, “who be you the ghost of? For I have heard of nary death close by.”

But there was no answer—only the ragged dancing in the wind. She shut her eyes, reached out her hand, and touched a sleeve. She

found a coat and inside that an emptiness, cold as ice. “You scarecrow,” she said. Her face lighted. “I ought to be shut up for

good,” she said with laughter. “My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow,” she said, “while I dancing with you.”

She kicked her foot over the furrow, and with mouth drawn down, shook her head once or twice in a little strutting way. Some husks blew down and whirled in streamers about her skirts.

Then she went on, parting her way from side to side with the cane, through the whispering field. At last she came to the end, to a wagon track where the silver grass blew between the red ruts. The quail were walking around like pullets, seeming all dainty and unseen.

“Walk pretty,” she said. “This the easy place. This the easy going.” She followed the track, swaying through the quiet bare fields, through the

little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there. “I walking in their sleep,” she said, nodding her head vigorously.

In a ravine she went where a spring was silently flowing through a hollow log. Old Phoenix bent and drank. “Sweet-gum makes the water sweet,” she said, and drank more. “Nobody know who made this well, for it was here when I was born.”

The track crossed a swampy part where the moss hung as white as lace from every limb. “Sleep on, alligators, and blow your bubbles.” Then the track went into the road.

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Deep, deep the road went down between the high green-colored banks. Overhead the live-oaks met, and it was as dark as a cave.

A black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch. She was meditating, and not ready, and when he came at her she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milkweed.

Down there, her senses drifted away. A dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull. So she lay there and presently went to talking. “Old woman,” she said to herself, “that black dog come up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now there he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you.”

A white man finally came along and found her—a hunter, a young man, with his dog on a chain.

“Well, Granny!” he laughed. “What are you doing there?” “Lying on my back like a June-bug waiting to be turned over, mister,”

she said, reaching up her hand. He lifted her up, gave her a swing in the air, and set her down. “Any-

thing broken, Granny?” “No sir, them old dead weeds is springy enough,” said Phoenix, when

she had got her breath. “I thank you for your trouble.” “Where do you live, Granny?” he asked, while the two dogs were

growling at each other. “Away back yonder, sir, behind the ridge. You can’t even see it from here.” “On your way home?” “No sir, going to town.” “Why, that’s too far! That’s as far as I walk when I come out myself, and

I get something for my trouble.” He patted the stuffed bag he carried, and there hung down a little closed claw. It was one of the bobwhites, with its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead. “Now you go on home, Granny!”

“I bound to go to town, mister,” said Phoenix. “The time come around.”

He gave another laugh, filling the whole landscape. “I know you old colored people! Wouldn’t miss going to town to see Santa Claus!”

But something held old Phoenix very still. The deep lines in her face went into a fierce and different radiation. Without warning, she had seen with her own eyes a flashing nickel fall out of the man’s pocket onto the ground.

“How old are you, Granny?” he was saying. “There is no telling, mister,” she said, “no telling.” Then she gave a little cry and clapped her hands and said, “Git on away

from here, dog! Look! Look at that dog!” She laughed as if in admiration. “He ain’t scared of nobody. He a big black dog.” She whispered, “Sic him!”

“Watch me get rid of that cur,” said the man. “Sic him, Pete! Sic him!”

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Phoenix heard the dogs fighting, and heard the man running and throwing sticks. She even heard a gunshot. But she was slowly bending forward by that time, further and further forward, the lids stretched down over her eyes, as if she were doing this in her sleep. Her chin was lowered almost to her knees. The yellow palm of her hand came out from the fold of her apron. Her fingers slid down and along the ground under the piece of money with the grace and care they would have in lifting an egg from under a setting hen. Then she slowly straightened up, she stood erect, and the nickel was in her apron pocket. A bird flew by. Her lips moved. “God watching me the whole time. I come to stealing.”

The man came back, and his own dog panted about them. “Well, I scared him off that time,” he said, and then he laughed and lifted his gun and pointed it at Phoenix.

She stood straight and faced him. “Doesn’t the gun scare you?” he said, still pointing it. “No, sir, I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than

what I done,” she said, holding utterly still. He smiled, and shouldered the gun. “Well, Granny,” he said, “you

must be a hundred years old, and scared of nothing. I’d give you a dime if I had any money with me. But you take my advice and stay home, and nothing will happen to you.”

“I bound to go on my way, mister,” said Phoenix. She inclined her head in the red rag. Then they went in different directions, but she could hear the gun shooting again and again over the hill.

She walked on. The shadows hung from the oak trees to the road like curtains. Then she smelled wood-smoke, and smelled the river, and she saw a steeple and the cabins on their steep steps. Dozens of little black children whirled around her. There ahead was Natchez shining. Bells were ringing. She walked on.

In the paved city it was Christmas time. There were red and green electric lights strung and crisscrossed everywhere, and all turned on in the daytime. Old Phoenix would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her.

She paused quietly on the sidewalk where people were passing by. A lady came along in the crowd, carrying an armful of red-, green-, and silver-wrapped presents; she gave off perfume like the red roses in hot summer, and Phoenix stopped her.

“Please, missy, will you lace up my shoe?” She held up her foot. “What do you want, Grandma?” “See my shoe,” said Phoenix. “Do all right for out in the country, but

wouldn’t look right to go in a big building.” “Stand still then, Grandma,” said the lady. She put her packages down

on the sidewalk beside her and laced and tied both shoes tightly.

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“Can’t lace ’em with a cane,” said Phoenix. “Thank you, missy. I doesn’t mind asking a nice lady to tie up my shoe, when I gets out on the street.”

Moving slowly and from side to side, she went into the big building, and into a tower of steps, where she walked up and around and around until her feet knew to stop.

She entered a door, and there she saw nailed up on the wall the docu- ment that had been stamped with the gold seal and framed in the gold frame, which matched the dream that was hung up in her head.

“Here I be,” she said. There was a fixed and ceremonial stiffness over her body.

“A charity case, I suppose,” said an attendant who sat at the desk before her.

But Phoenix only looked above her head. There was sweat on her face, the wrinkles in her skin shone like a bright net.

“Speak up, Grandma,” the woman said. “What’s your name? We must have your history, you know. Have you been here before? What seems to be the trouble with you?”

Old Phoenix only gave a twitch to her face as if a fly were bothering her. “Are you deaf?” cried the attendant. But then the nurse came in. “Oh, that’s just old Aunt Phoenix,” she said. “She doesn’t come for

herself—she has a little grandson. She makes these trips just as regular as clockwork. She lives away back off the Old Natchez Trace.” She bent down. “Well, Aunt Phoenix, why don’t you just take a seat? We won’t keep you standing after your long trip.” She pointed.

The old woman sat down, bolt upright in the chair. “Now, how is the boy?” asked the nurse. Old Phoenix did not speak. “I said, how is the boy?” But Phoenix only waited and stared straight ahead, her face very sol-

emn and withdrawn into rigidity. “Is his throat any better?” asked the nurse. “Aunt Phoenix, don’t you

hear me? Is your grandson’s throat any better since the last time you came for the medicine?”

With her hands on her knees, the old woman waited, silent, erect and motionless, just as if she were in armor.

“You mustn’t take up our time this way, Aunt Phoenix,” the nurse said. “Tell us quickly about your grandson, and get it over. He isn’t dead, is he?”

At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke.

“My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip.”

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“Forgot?” The nurse frowned. “After you came so far?” Then Phoenix was like an old woman begging a dignified forgiveness

for waking up frightened in the night. “I never did go to school, I was too old at the Surrender,” she said in a soft voice. “I’m an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming.”

“Throat never heals, does it?” said the nurse, speaking in a loud, sure voice to old Phoenix. By now she had a card with something written on it, a little list. “Yes. Swallowed lye. When was it?—January—two, three years ago—?”

Phoenix spoke unasked now. “No, missy, he not dead, he just the same. Every little while his throat begin to close up again, and he not able to swallow. He not get his breath. He not able to help himself. So the time come around, and I go on another trip for the soothing medicine.”

“All right. The doctor said as long as you came to get it, you could have it,” said the nurse. “But it’s an obstinate case.”

“My little grandson, he sit up there in the house all wrapped up, wait- ing by himself,” Phoenix went on. “We is the only two left in the world. He suffer and it don’t seem to put him back at all. He got a sweet look. He going to last. He wear a little patch quilt and peep out holding his mouth open like a little bird. I remembers so plain now. I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time. I could tell him from all the others in creation.”

“All right.” The nurse was trying to hush her now. She brought her a bottle of medicine. “Charity,” she said, making a check mark in a book.

Old Phoenix held the bottle close to her eyes, and then carefully put it into her pocket.

“I thank you,” she said. “It’s Christmas time, Grandma,” said the attendant. “Could I give you

a few pennies out of my purse?” “Five pennies is a nickel,” said Phoenix stiffly. “Here’s a nickel,” said the attendant. Phoenix rose carefully and held out her hand. She received the nickel

and then fished the other nickel out of her pocket and laid it beside the new one. She stared at her palm closely, with her head on one side.

Then she gave a tap with her cane on the floor. “This is what come to me to do,” she said. “I going to the store and

buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world. I’ll march myself back where he waiting, holding it straight up in this hand.”

She lifted her free hand, gave a little nod, turned around, and walked out of the doctor’s office. Then her slow step began on the stairs, going down.

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Q U E S T I O N S

1. Write a precise, well-developed sentence that states as fully as possible the theme of the story. Remember to avoid clichés or oversimplification.

2. Apart from the story’s major theme, can you isolate minor themes that help give the story richness and depth? List as many as you can.

3. Discuss the way the characterization of Phoenix contributes to the theme. 4. Analyze the minor characters. What do they reveal about Phoenix and about the

world in which she lives? 5. Like many classic works of literature, “A Worn Path” features a journey and a

quest. Discuss the elements of plot and structure that dramatize Phoenix’s jour- ney. What are the obstacles to her quest, and how does she overcome them?

6. In answer to a student who wrote to ask her, “Is the grandson really dead?” Welty responded, “My best answer would be: Phoenix is alive.” What might have led the student to ask that question? How can the author’s remark be seen as an answer?

NADINE GORDIMER

Once upon a Time 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 up—or 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 dis- tend 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 passage—to 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

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once upon a time First published in 1989. Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) was born in a small town near Johannesburg, South Africa, and graduated from the University of Witwatersrand. She taught at several American universities but lived most of her life in her native country. A  prolific writer, Gordimer published more than twenty books of fiction, both novels and short story collections. In addition to England’s prestigious Booker Prize for fiction, she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

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 see- ing it, in the dark. I lay quite still—a 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 buck- ling, 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, bring- ing 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 Tsonga° 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 body—release me to sleep again. So I began to tell myself a story; a bed- time 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

stopes: broad open spaces in mines, created during the extraction of minerals Chopi and Tsonga: two peoples from Mozambique, northeast of South Africa

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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 prop- erty 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 . . . Non- sense, my dear, said the husband, there are police and soldiers and tear-gas and guns to keep them away. But to please her—for 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 suburb—he 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.

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 responsi- bility 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 answered—it seemed—by 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

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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 malt,° 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; any- thing, baas,° 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 street—for it was a beautiful suburb, spoilt only by their presence—and 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 tsotsis,° 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 wife—the little boy got a Space Man outfit and a book of fairy tales.

But every week there were more reports of intrusion: in broad day- light and the dead of night, in the early hours of the morning, and even in the lovely summer twilight—a 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 verti- cal 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.

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single malt: an expensive Scotch whiskey baas: boss tsotsis: hooligans

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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 differ- ent 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 reconcil- ing the aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spanish Villa style (spikes painted pink) and with the plaster urns of neoclassical façades (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 compar- ing the possible effectiveness of each style against its appearance; and after several weeks when they paused before this barricade or that without need- ing 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

SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING 239

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 it—the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener—into the house.

Q U E S T I O N S

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 stor y’s final paragraph in detail. How does it help to elucidate the theme?

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. Bearing in mind point 5 in the introduction to this chapter (“there is no one way of stating the theme of a story”), write out three alternative statements of theme for one or more of the following:

a. Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow” (page 79). b. Munro, “How I Met My Husband” (page 118). c. Chekhov, “The Darling” (page 216).

2. The theme of a story often is displayed in the development of the protagonist or in the epiphany that the protagonist experiences. But in some stories, there may be more than one focal character, and the theme must therefore be inferred by examining the different experiences of more than one person. Demonstrate the validity of this statement by examining the main characters in one of the following:

a. Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow” (page 79). b. Walker, “Everyday Use” (page 147). c. Hurston, “Sweat” (page 583).

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C H A P T E R F I V E

Point of View

Primitive storytellers, unbothered by considerations of form, simply spun their tales. “Once upon a time,” they began, and proceeded to narrate the story to their listeners, describing the characters when necessary, telling what the characters thought and felt as well as what they did, and interjecting comments and ideas of their own. Modern fiction writers are artistically more self-conscious. They realize that there are many ways of telling a story; they decide on a method before they begin, or discover one while in the act of writing, and may even set up rules for themselves. Instead of telling the story themselves, they may let one of the characters tell it; they may tell it by means of letters or diaries; they may confine themselves to recording the thoughts of one of the characters. With the growth of artistic consciousness, the question of point of view—of who tells the story, and therefore of how it gets told—has assumed special importance.

To determine the point of view of a story, we ask, “Who tells the story?” and “How much is this person allowed to know?” and especially, “To what extent does the narrator look inside the characters and report their thoughts and feelings?”

Though many variations and combinations are possible, the basic points of view are four, as follows:

1. Omniscient 2. Third-person limited (a) Major character

(b) Minor character 3. First person (a) Major character

(b) Minor character 4. Objective

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1. In the omniscient point of view, the story is told in the third person by a narrator whose knowledge and prerogatives are unlimited. Such narrators are free to go wherever they wish, to peer inside the minds and hearts of characters at will and tell us what they are thinking or feeling. These narrators can interpret behavior and can comment, if they wish, on the significance of their stories. They know all. They can tell us as much or as little as they please.

The following version of Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is told from the omniscient point of view. Notice that in it we are told not only what both characters do and say but also what they think and feel; notice also that the narrator comments at the end on the significance of the story. (The phrases in which the narrator enters into the thoughts or feel- ings of the ant and the grasshopper have been italicized; the comment by the author is printed in capitals.)

Weary in every limb, the ant tugged over the snow a piece of corn he had stored up last summer. It would taste mighty good at dinner tonight.

A grasshopper, cold and hungry, looked on. Finally he could bear it no longer. “Please, friend ant, may I have a bite of corn?”

“What were you doing all last summer?” asked the ant. He looked the grasshopper up and down. He knew its kind.

“I sang from dawn till dark,” replied the grasshopper, happily unaware of what was coming next.

“Well,” said the ant, hardly bothering to conceal his contempt, “since you sang all summer, you can dance all winter.”

HE WHO IDLES WHEN HE’S YOUNG WILL HAVE NOTHING WHEN HE’S OLD

Stories told from the omniscient point of view may vary widely in the amount of omniscience the narrator is allowed. In “Hunters in the Snow,” we are frequently allowed into the mind of Tub, but near the end of the story the omniscient narrator takes over and gives us information none of the characters could know. In “The Destructors,” although we are taken into the minds of Blackie, Mike, the gang as a group, Old Misery, and the lorry driver, we are not taken into the mind of Trevor—the most important character. In “The Most Dangerous Game,” we are  confined to the thoughts and feelings of Rainsford, except for the brief passage between Rainsford’s leap into the sea and his waking in Zaroff’s bed, during which the point of view shifts to General Zaroff.

The omniscient is the most flexible point of view and permits the widest scope. It is also the most subject to abuse. It offers constant danger that the narrator may come between the readers and the story, or that the continual shifting of viewpoint from character to character may cause a breakdown in coherence or unity. Used skillfully, it enables the author to achieve simultaneous breadth and depth. Unskillfully used, it can destroy the illusion of reality that the story attempts to create.

2. In the third-person limited point of view, the story is told in the third person, but from the viewpoint of one character in the story. Such point-of-view characters are filters through whose eyes and minds writers look at the events. Authors employing this perspective may move both inside and outside these characters but never leave their sides. They tell us what these characters see and hear and what they think and feel; they possi- bly interpret the characters’ thoughts and behavior. They know everything about their point-of-view characters—often more than the characters know about themselves. But they limit themselves to these characters’ percep- tions and show no direct knowledge of what other characters are thinking or feeling or doing, except for what the point-of-view character knows or can infer about them. The chosen character may be either a major or a minor character, a participant or an observer, and this choice also will be a very important one for the story. “Babylon Revisited,” “Miss Brill,” and “A Worn Path” are told from the third-person limited point of view, from the perspective of the main character. The use of this viewpoint with a minor character is rare in the short story, and is not illustrated in this book.

Here is “The Ant and the Grasshopper” told, in the third person, from the point of view of the ant. Notice that this time we are told nothing of what the grasshopper thinks or feels. We see and hear and know of him only what the ant sees and hears and knows.

Weary in every limb, the ant tugged over the snow a piece of corn he had stored up last summer. It would taste mighty good at dinner tonight. It was then that he noticed the grasshopper, looking cold and pinched.

“Please, friend ant, may I have a bite of your corn?” asked the grasshopper.

He looked the grasshopper up and down. “What were you doing all last summer?” he asked. He knew its kind.

“I sang from dawn till dark,” replied the grasshopper. “Well,” said the ant, hardly bothering to conceal his contempt,

“since you sang all summer, you can dance all winter.”

The third-person limited point of view, since it acquaints us with the world through the mind and senses of only one character, approximates

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more closely than the omniscient the conditions of real life; it also offers a ready-made unifying element, since all details of the story are the experience of one character. And it affords an additional device of characterization, since what a point-of-view character does or does not find noteworthy, and the inferences that such a character draws about other characters’ actions and motives, may reveal biases or limitations in the observer. At the same time it offers a limited field of observation, for the readers can go nowhere except where the chosen character goes, and there may be difficulty in having the character naturally cognizant of all important events. Clumsy writers will constantly have the focal character listening at keyholes, accidentally overhearing important conversations, or coincidentally being present when important events occur.

A variant of third-person limited point of view, illustrated in this chapter by Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” is called stream of consciousness. The point of view presents the apparently random thoughts going through a character’s head within a certain period of time, mingling memory and present experiences, and employing transitional links that are psychological rather than strictly logical. (First-person nar- rators might also tell their stories through stream of consciousness, though first-person use of this technique is relatively rare.)

3. In the first-person point of view, the author disappears into one of the characters, who tells the story in the first person. This character, again, may be either a major or a minor character, protagonist or observer, and it will make considerable difference whether the protagonist tells the story or someone else tells it. In “How I Met My Husband,” the protago- nist tells the story in the first person. In “A Rose for Emily,” presented in Part 4, the story is told in the unusual first-person plural, from the vantage point of the townspeople observing Emily’s life through the years.

Our fable is retold below in the first person from the point of view of the grasshopper. (The whole story is italicized because it all comes out of the grasshopper’s mind.)

Cold and hungry, I watched the ant tugging over the snow a piece of corn he had stored up last summer. My feelers twitched, and I was conscious of a tic in my left hind leg. Finally I could bear it no longer.

“Please, friend ant,” I asked, “may I have a bite of your corn?” He looked me up and down. “What were you doing all last

summer?” he asked, rather too smugly it seemed to me. “I sang from dawn till dark,” I said innocently, remembering the

happy times. “Well,” he said, with a priggish sneer, “since you sang all summer,

you can dance all winter.”

The first-person point of view shares the virtues and limitations of the third-person limited. At times, it offers a gain in immediacy and reality, since we get the story directly from a participant, the author as intermediary being eliminated. It offers no opportunity, however, for direct interpretation by the author, and there is constant danger that narrators may be made to transcend their own sensitivity, their knowledge, or their powers of language in telling a story. Talented authors, however, can make tremendous literary capital out of the very limitations of their narrators. The first-person point of view offers excellent opportunities for dramatic irony and for studies in limited or blunted human perceptiveness. In “How I Met My Husband,” for instance, there is an increasingly clear difference between what the narrator perceives and what the reader perceives as the story proceeds. Even though Edie is clearly narrating her story from the vantage point of maturity—ultimately we know this from the ending and from the title itself—she rarely allows her mature voice to intrude or to make judgments on Edie’s thoughts and feelings as a fifteen-year-old girl infatuated with a handsome pilot. The story gains in emotional power because of the poignancy of youthful romanticism that Edie’s hopes and wishes represent, and because of the inevitable disillusionment she must suffer. By choosing this point of view, Munro offers an interpretation of the material indirectly, through her dramatization of Edie’s experiences.

In other stories, such as “A Rose for Emily,” the author intends the first-person viewpoint to suggest a conventional set of perceptions and attitudes, perhaps including those of the author and the reader. Identifi- cations of a narrator’s attitudes with the author’s, however, must always be undertaken with extreme caution; they are justified only if the total material of the story supports them, or if outside evidence (for example, a statement by the author) supports such an identification. In “A Rose for Emily” the narrative detachment does reflect the author’s own; nev- ertheless, much of the interest of the story arises from the limited view- point of the townspeople and the cloak of mystery surrounding Emily and her life inside the house.

4. In the objective point of view, the narrator disappears into a kind of roving sound camera. This camera can go anywhere but can re- cord only what is seen and heard. It cannot comment, interpret, or enter a character’s mind. With this point of view (sometimes called also the dramatic point of view) readers are placed in the position of spectators at a movie or play. They see what the characters do and hear what they say but must infer what they think or feel and what they are like. Authors are not there to explain. The purest example of a story told from the objective point of view would be one written entirely in dialogue, for as

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CHAPTER FIVE / POINT OF VIEW 245

soon as authors add words of their own, they begin to interpret through their very choice of words. Actually, few stories using this point of view are antiseptically pure, for the limitations it imposes on the author are severe. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” presented in this chapter, is es- sentially objective in its narration.

The following version of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is also told from the objective point of view. (Since we are nowhere taken into the thoughts or feelings of the characters, none of this version is printed in italics.)

The ant tugged over the snow a piece of corn he had stored up last summer, perspiring in spite of the cold.

A grasshopper, his feelers twitching and with a tic in his left hind leg, looked on for some time. Finally he asked, “Please, friend ant, may I have a bite of your corn?”

The ant looked the grasshopper up and down. “What were you doing all last summer?” he snapped.

“I sang from dawn till dark,” replied the grasshopper, not changing his tone.

“Well,” said the ant, and a faint smile crept into his face, “since you sang all summer, you can dance all winter.”

The objective point of view requires readers to draw their own infer- ences. But it must rely heavily on external action and dialogue, and it offers no opportunities for direct interpretation by the author.

Each of the points of view has its advantages, its limitations, and its peculiar uses. Ideally the choice of the author will depend on the materials and the purpose of a story. Authors choose the point of view that enables them to present their particular materials most effectively in terms of their purposes. Writers of murder mysteries with suspense and thrills as the purpose will ordinarily avoid using the point of view of the murderer or the brilliant detective: otherwise, they would have to reveal at the beginning the secrets they wish to conceal until the end. On the other hand, if they are interested in exploring criminal psychology, the mur- derer’s point of view might be by far the most effective. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, A. Conan Doyle effectively uses the somewhat impercep- tive Dr. Watson as his narrator, so that the reader may be kept in the dark as long as possible and then be as amazed as Watson is by Holmes’s deductive powers. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, however, the author is interested not in mystifying and surprising but in illuminating the moral and psychological operations of the human soul in the act of

246 CHAPTER FIVE / POINT OF VIEW

taking life; he therefore tells the story from the viewpoint of a sensitive and intelligent murderer.

For readers, the examination of point of view may be important both for understanding and for evaluating the story. First, they should know whether the events of the story are being interpreted by a narrator or by one of the characters. If the latter, they must ask how this character’s mind and personality affect the interpretation, whether the character is percep- tive or imperceptive, and whether the interpretation can be accepted at face value or must be discounted because of ignorance, stupidity, or self-deception.

Next, readers should ask whether the writer has chosen the point of view for maximum revelation of the material or for another reason. The author may choose the point of view mainly to conceal certain information till the end of the story and thus maintain suspense and create surprise. The author may even deliberately mislead readers by presenting the events through a character who puts a false interpretation on them. Such a false interpretation may be justified if it leads eventually to more effective rev- elation of character and theme. If it is there merely to trick readers, it is obviously less justifiable.

Finally, readers should ask whether the author has used the selected point of view fairly and consistently. Even in commercial fiction we have a right to demand fair treatment. If the person to whose thoughts and feelings we are admitted has pertinent information that is not revealed, we legitimately feel cheated. To have a chance to solve a mur- der mystery, we must know what the detective learns. A writer also should be consistent in the point of view; if it shifts, it should do so for a valid artistic reason. Serious literary writers choose and use point of view so as to yield ultimately the greatest possible insight, either in fullness or in intensity.

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R F I V E

1. Explain how to determine the point of view in a story. 2. Describe the characteristics of omniscient point of view. 3. Review the definition of third-person limited point of view. 4. Consider the virtues and limitations of first-person point of view. 5. Explore the use of objective point of view in Hemingway’s “Hills Like

White Elephants,” presented in this chapter.

WILLA CATHER

Paul’s Case It was Paul’s afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh

High School to account for his various misdemeanors. He had been sus- pended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal’s office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown, and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there was something of a dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension.

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical bril- liancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce.

When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there, Paul stated, politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancor and aggrieved- ness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder and impertinence were among the offences named, yet each of his instructors felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the boy’s; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind him. The astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and definitely personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another, he had made all his teachers, men and women alike,

paul’s case Written in 1904, first published in 1905. Willa Cather (1873–1947) was born in Virginia and grew up and was educated in Nebraska. From 1895 to 1905 she lived and worked in Pittsburgh, first as a journalist, writing drama and music criticism, later as a teacher of English and Latin in two Pittsburgh high schools. In 1902 she traveled in Europe.

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conscious of the same feeling of physical aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his hand shading his eyes; in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; in another he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous intent.

His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood through it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptu- ous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that ordeal, but his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand which held his hat. Paul was always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him and trying to detect something. This conscious expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, was usually attributed to insolence or “smartness.”

As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an impertinent remark of the boy’s, and the Principal asked him whether he thought that a courteous speech to make to a woman. Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t mean to be polite or impolite, either. I guess it’s a sort of way I have, of saying things regardless.”

The Principal asked him whether he didn’t think that a way it would be well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told that he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was like a repetition of the scandalous red carnation.

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing-master voiced the feeling of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which none of them understood. He added: “I don’t really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there’s something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong for one thing. There is something wrong about the fellow.”

The drawing-master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man’s about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep.

His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the gruesome game of intemperate reproach. One of them remembered having seen a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.

5

10

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the Soldiers’ Chorus from Faust, looking behind him now and then to see whether some of his teach- ers were not there to witness his light-heartedness. As it was now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper.

When he reached the concert hall, the doors were not yet open. It was chilly outside, and he decided to go up into the picture gallery—always deserted at this hour—where there were some of Raffelli’s gay studies of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that always exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the old guard, who sat in the corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the place and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought him to look at his watch, it was after seven o’clock and he rose with a start and ran downstairs, mak- ing a face at Augustus Caesar, peering out from the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of Milo as he passed her on the stairway.

When Paul reached the ushers’ dressing-room, half a dozen boys were there already, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one of the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul thought it very becoming—though he knew the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always excited while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the pre- liminary flourishes of the horns in the music-room; but tonight he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on him.

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the house to seat the early comers. He was a model usher. Gracious and smiling he ran up and down the aisles. Nothing was too much trouble for him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were his great- est pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought him a charm- ing boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the color came to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were a great reception and Paul were the host. Just as the musicians came out to take their places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the seats which a prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She betrayed some embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a hauteur° which subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled for a moment, and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what business had she here among all these fine

hauteur: condescension

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people and gay colors? He looked her over and decided that she was not appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out of kindness, he reflected, as he put down a seat for her, and she had about as much right to sit there as he had.

When the symphony began, Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done before the Rico. It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but the first sight of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul forgot even the nastiness of his teacher’s being there, and gave himself up to the peculiar intoxication such person- ages always had for him. The soloist chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the mother of many children; but she wore a satin gown and a tiara, and she had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, which always blinded Paul to any possible defects.

After a concert was over, Paul was often irritable and wretched until he got to sleep—and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let down; of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after hastily chang- ing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to the side door where the singer’s carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.

Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like those of a lighted cardboard house under a Christmas tree. All the actors and singers of any importance stayed there when they were in Pittsburgh, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there in the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people go in and out, longing to enter and leave schoolmasters and dull care behind him forever.

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who helped her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial auf wiedersehen°— which set Paul to wondering whether she were not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the singer alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors which were opened by a Negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the

15

auf wiedersehen: goodbye or farewell

warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in the supper-party pictures of the Sunday supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he wanted—tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to come sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wall- paper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box, and over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto, “Feed my Lambs,” which had been worked in red worsted by his mother, whom Paul could not remember.

Half an hour later, Paul alighted from the Negley Avenue car and went slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and where business men of moderate means begot and reared large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath School and learned the shorter catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respect- able beds, of common food, of a house permeated by kitchen odors; a shud- dering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all: his ugly sleeping chamber; the old bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spigots; his father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his nightshirt, his

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feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by his father tonight; that he could not toss again on that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his father that he had no carfare, and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayed all night.

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, and raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made; but the floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He found a soap-box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul’s head was always singu- larly clear. Suppose his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then again, suppose a day should come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to church and Sabbath School, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street usually sat out on their front “stoops,” and talked to their neighbors on the next stoop, or called to those across the street in neighborly fashion. The men sat placidly on gay cushions placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in their Sunday “waists,” sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of a kindergarten. The men on the steps—all in their shirt-sleeves, their vests unbuttoned, sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks about their

sons’ progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all afternoon on the lowest step of his “stoop,” staring into the street, while his sisters, in their rock- ers, were talking to the minister’s daughters next door about how many shirtwaists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles someone had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm, and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, and the neighbors joked about the suspicious color of the pitcher.

Today Paul’s father, on the top step, was talking to a young man who shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his father’s dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, nearsighted eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago—he was now barely twenty-six—he had been a trifle “dissipated,” but in order to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief’s advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an angular schoolmistress, much older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all nearsighted like herself.

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home, and “knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy.” His father told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of putting in an electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings, that were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of cash-boys who had become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.

After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul ner- vously asked his father whether he could go to George’s to get some help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for carfare. This latter request

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he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the dishwater from his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a down- town car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to live again.

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the downtown theaters was an acquaintance of Paul’s, and the boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment loiter- ing about Charley Edwards’s dressing-room. He had won a place among Edwards’s following not only because the young actor, who could not afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term “vocation.”

It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul’s fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, bril- liant things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-School picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odors of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of the theater was for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London

30

of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls, with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing-carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul’s teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by garish fiction; but the truth was, he scarcely ever read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends urged upon him—well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel-organ. He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stage-struck—not, at any rate, in the usual acceptation of the expression. He had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after league, away from everything.

After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the schoolroom more than ever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the prosy men who never wore frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by the way of a joke, anyway. He had autographed pictures of all the members of the stock company which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless, he would bid all the boys goodbye, announcing that he was going to travel for a while; going to Naples, to California, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he would have to defer his voyage until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his instructors know how heartily he despised them, and how thoroughly he was appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool with theorems; adding—with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of that nervous bravado which so perplexed them—that he was helping the people down at the stock company; they were old friends of his.

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The upshot of the matter was that the Principal went to Paul’s father, and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper at the theater was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy’s father not to see him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul’s stories reached them—especially the women. They were hardwork- ing women, most of them supporting indolent husbands or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father, that Paul’s was a bad case.

The east-bound train was plowing through a January snowstorm; the dull dawn was beginning to show grey when the engine whistled a mile out of Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window-glass with his hand, and peered out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the fences, while here and there the tall dead grass and dried weed stalks pro- truded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of laborers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had made the all-night journey in a day coach because he was afraid if he took a Pullman he might be seen by some Pittsburgh business man who had noticed him in Denny and Carson’s office. When the whistle woke him, he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in openmouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.

When he arrived at the Jersey City station, he hurried through his breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him. After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman, and had himself driven to a men’s furnishing establishment which was just opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying with endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put on in the fitting-room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled into the cab with his new shirts. Then he drove to a hatter’s and a shoe house. His next errand was at Tiffany’s, where he selected silver-mounted brushes and a scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked, he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his purchases packed into various traveling-bags.

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It was a little after one o’clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and, after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story plausibly and had no trouble, since he offered to pay for them in advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping-room, sitting-room, and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times Paul had planned this entry into New York. He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his scrapbook at home there were pages of description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers.

When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell-boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white bathroom, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely see across the street; but within, the air was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the taboret° beside the couch, and threw himself down with a long sigh, covering himself with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty- four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theater and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportu- nity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own courage—for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread which, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. Until now, he could not remember a time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there—behind him, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him—and Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.

taboret: small stand or cabinet

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But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yes- terday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny & Carson’s deposit, as usual—but this time he was instructed to leave the book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the banknotes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for a full day’s holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable pretext. The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From the time he slipped the banknotes into his pocket until he boarded the night train for New York, he had not known a moment’s hesitation.

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done; and this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs. He watched the snowflakes whirling by his window until he fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a start; one of his precious days gone already! He spent nearly an hour in dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be.

When he went downstairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen’s wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boys in woolen mufflers were shoveling off the doorsteps; the Avenue stages made fine spots of color against the white street. Here and there on the corners whole flower gardens blooming behind glass windows, against which the snowflakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies-of-the-valley—somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage winter-piece.

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed from the hotels that reared their many stories fearlessly up into the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of carriages poured down the Avenue, intersected here and there by other streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up and down the red velvet

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carpet laid from the door to the street. Above, about, within it all, was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every side of him towered the glaring affirma- tion of the omnipotence of wealth.

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snowflakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.

When Paul came down to dinner, the music of the orchestra floated up the elevator shaft to greet him. As he stepped into the thronged cor- ridor, he sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of color—he had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms, reception- rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him alone.

When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The flowers, the white linen, the many-colored wine-glasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulat- ing repetitions of the “Blue Danube” from the orchestra, all flooded Paul’s dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne was added—that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in his glass—Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged-looking business men boarded the early car? Mere rivets in a machine they seemed to Paul—sickening men, with combings of children’s hair always hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes. Cordelia Street—Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in his loge at the Opera. He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different

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from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window. When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow wallpaper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed.

On Sunday morning the city was practically snowbound. Paul breakfasted late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a “little flyer” over Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went off together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o’clock the next morning. They had started out in the confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o’clock in the afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and the Pittsburgh papers.

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous. His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette, and his sense of power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for pleasure, even at school; but to make himself noticed and admired, to assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, “dress the part.” It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth of detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy’s father had refunded the full amount of his theft, and that they had no intention of prosecuting. The

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Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and Paul’s Sabbath-School teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that end. The rumor had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into the chair, weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years;—Sabbath School, Young People’s Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. With something of the childish belief in miracles with which he had so often gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the corridor to the elevator.

He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all-sufficient. The glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he was game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of these fortunate beings? Was he not still himself, and in his own place? He drummed a nervous accom- paniment to the music and looked about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the violin and the chill sweet- ness of his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before now. But the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he had to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He looked affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, it had paid indeed!

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead-heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched. There came upon him one of those fateful attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was

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physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closed his eyes and let the tide of realities wash over him.

His father was in New York; “stopping at some joint or other,” he told himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York, and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his dressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up from dinner—but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the look of it, anyway.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of any- thing, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the dark corner at last, and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there; but some- how not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of town. The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks projected, singu- larly black, above it.

Once well into the country, Paul dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, the tooth- less old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bit- ter burning on his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with cold, he noticed; all their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen

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in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed awhile, from his weak condition, seeming insensible to the cold.

The sound of an approaching train woke him and he started to his feet, remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest—his body being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs gently relaxed. Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Technically we should classify the author’s point of view as omniscient, for she enters into the minds of characters at will. Nevertheless, early in the story the focus changes rather abruptly. Locate the point where the change occurs. Through whose eyes do we see Paul prior to this point? Through whose eyes do we see him afterward? What is the purpose of this shift? Does it offer any clue to the purpose of the story?

2. What details of Paul’s appearance and behavior, as his teachers see him, indicate that he is different from most other boys?

3. Explain Paul’s behavior. Why does he lie? What does he hate? What does he want? Contrast the world of Cordelia Street with the worlds that Paul finds at Carnegie Hall, at the Schenley, at the stock theater, and in New York.

4. Is Paul artistic? Describe his reactions to music, to painting, to literature, and to the theater. What value does he find in the arts?

5. Is Paul a static or a developing character? If the latter, at what points does he change? Why?

6. What do Paul’s clandestine trips to the stock theater, his trip to New York, and his suicide have in common?

7. Compare Paul and the college boy he meets in New York (paragraph 56). Are they two of a kind? If not, how do they differ?

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8. What are the implications of the title? What does the last sentence of the story do to the reader’s focus of vision?

9. Are there any clues to the causes of Paul’s unusual personality? How many? In what is the author chiefly interested?

10. In what two cities is the story set? Does this choice of setting have any symbolic value? Could the story have been set as validly in Cleveland and Detroit? In San Francisco and Los Angeles? In New Orleans and Birmingham?

SHIRLEY JACKSON

The Lottery 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 26th, 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 bois- terous 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 smooth- est 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 the boys, and the very small children 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, speak- ing 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

the lottery First published in 1948. Shirley Jackson (1919–1965) was born in San Francisco and spent most of her early life in California. After her marriage in 1940 she lived in a quiet rural community in Vermont.

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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 teenage 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 the black box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and

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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’s 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 away, 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 part 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 per- son 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 were 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 laugh- ter 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 m’mother and me.” He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said things like “Good fellow, Jack,” 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 look- ing 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.”

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“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 hands, 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 that 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.”

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“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, saying, “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 husband’s 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.”

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270 CHAPTER FIVE / POINT OF VIEW

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 over-large, nearly 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

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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. Mrs. 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.”

Mrs. 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 a 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 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.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. What is a “lottery”? How does the title lead you to expect something very dif- ferent from what the story presents?

2. What is a scapegoat? Who is the scapegoat in this story? What other examples of scapegoating can you recall?

3. What normal law of probability has been suspended in this story? Granting this initial implausibility, does the story proceed naturally?

4. What is the significance of the fact that the original box has been lost and many parts of the ritual have been forgotten? Can you find a statement in the story that most likely explains the original purpose of the ritual?

5. What different attitudes toward the ritual stoning are represented by (a) Mr. Sum- mers, (b) Old Man Warner, (c) Mr. and Mrs. Adams, (d) Mrs. Hutchinson, (e) the villagers in general? Which attitude most closely reflects the point of the story?

6. By transporting a primitivistic ritual into a modern setting, the story reveals something about human nature and human society. What?

7. Many modern customs or rituals have developed from primitive origins (for example, the decoration of a Christmas tree). Can you identify some others? What would set them apart from the ritual stoning in this story?

8. Can you suppor t a claim that this stor y is presented from the objective point of view? Why is the dispassionate, matter-of-fact tone of the stor y so effective?

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272 CHAPTER FIVE / POINT OF VIEW

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry’s pudgy careful fingers

and pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches. Doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose! “Get along now, take your schoolbooks and go. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Doctor Harry spread a warm paw like a cushion on her forehead where the forked green vein danced and made her eyelids twitch. “Now, now, be a good girl, and we’ll have you up in no time.”

“That’s no way to speak to a woman nearly eighty years old just because she’s down. I’d have you respect your elders, young man.”

“Well, Missy, excuse me.” Doctor Harry patted her cheek. “But I’ve got to warn you, haven’t I? You’re a marvel, but you must be careful or you’re going to be good and sorry.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m going to be. I’m on my feet now, morally speaking. It’s Cornelia. I had to go to bed to get rid of her.”

Her bones felt loose, and floated around in her skin, and Doctor Harry floated like a balloon around the foot of the bed. He floated and pulled down his waistcoat and swung his glasses on a cord. “Well, stay where you are, it certainly can’t hurt you.”

“Get along and doctor your sick,” said Granny Weatherall. “Leave a well woman alone. I’ll call for you when I want you. . . . Where were you forty years ago when I pulled through milk-leg and double pneumonia? You weren’t even born. Don’t let Cornelia lead you on,” she shouted, because Doctor Harry appeared to float up to the ceiling and out. “I pay my own bills, and I don’t throw my money away on nonsense!”

She meant to wave good-by, but it was too much trouble. Her eyes closed of themselves, it was like a dark curtain drawn around the bed. The pillow rose and floated under her, pleasant as a hammock in a light wind. She listened to the leaves rustling outside the window. No, somebody was swishing newspapers: no, Cornelia and Doctor Harry were whispering together. She leaped broad awake, thinking they whispered in her ear.

“She was never like this, never like this!” “Well, what can we expect?” “Yes, eighty years old. . . .”

Well, and what if she was? She still had ears. It was like Cornelia to whisper around doors. She always kept things secret in such a public way.

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the jilting of granny weatherall First published in 1930. Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) was born and grew up in Texas, was educated at convent schools in New Orleans, and lived in Chicago, Fort Worth, Mexico, and New York City before writing this story.

She was always being tactful and kind. Cornelia was dutiful; that was the trouble with her. Dutiful and good: “So good and dutiful,” said Granny, “that I’d like to spank her.” She saw herself spanking Cornelia and making a fine job of it.

“What’d you say, Mother?” Granny felt her face tying up in hard knots. “Can’t a body think, I’d like to know?” “I thought you might want something.” “I do. I want a lot of things. First off, go away and don’t whisper.” She lay and drowsed, hoping in her sleep that the children would keep

out and let her rest a minute. It had been a long day. Not that she was tired. It was always pleasant to snatch a minute now and then. There was always so much to be done, let me see: tomorrow.

Tomorrow was far away and there was nothing to trouble about. Things were finished somehow when the time came; thank God there was always a little margin left over for peace: then a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly. It was good to have every- thing clean and folded away, with the hair brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white embroidered linen: the day started without fuss and the pantry shelves laid out with rows of jelly glasses and brown jugs and white stone-china jars with blue whirligigs and words painted on them: coffee, tea, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, allspice: and the bronze clock with the lion on top nicely dusted off. The dust that lion could collect in twenty- four hours! The box in the attic with all those letters tied up, well, she’d have to go through that tomorrow. All those letters—George’s letters and John’s letters and her letters to them both—lying around for the children to find afterwards made her uneasy. Yes, that would be tomorrow’s busi- ness. No use to let them know how silly she had been once.

While she was rummaging around she found death in her mind and it felt clammy and unfamiliar. She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again. Let it take care of itself now. When she was sixty she had felt very old, finished, and went around making farewell trips to see her children and grandchildren, with a secret in her mind: This is the very last of your mother, children! Then she made her will and came down with a long fever. That was all just a notion like a lot of other things, but it was lucky too, for she had once for all got over the idea of dying for a long time. Now she couldn’t be worried. She hoped she had better sense now. Her father had lived to be one hundred and two years old and had drunk a noggin of strong hot toddy on his last birthday. He told the reporters it was his daily habit, and he owed his long life to that. He had made quite a scandal and was very pleased about it. She believed she’d just plague Cornelia a little.

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“Cornelia! Cornelia!” No footsteps, but a sudden hand on her cheek. “Bless you, where have you been?”

“Here, Mother.” “Well, Cornelia, I want a noggin of hot toddy.” “Are you cold, darling?” “I’m chilly, Cornelia. Lying in bed stops the circulation. I must have

told you that a thousand times.” Well, she could just hear Cornelia telling her husband that Mother

was getting a little childish and they’d have to humor her. The thing that most annoyed her was that Cornelia thought she was deaf, dumb, and blind. Little hasty glances and tiny gestures tossed around her and over her head saying, “Don’t cross her, let her have her way, she’s eighty years old,” and she sitting there as if she lived in a thin glass cage. Sometimes Granny almost made up her mind to pack up and move back to her own house where nobody could remind her every minute that she was old. Wait, wait, Cornelia, till your own children whisper behind your back!

In her day she had kept a better house and had got more work done. She wasn’t too old yet for Lydia to be driving eighty miles for advice when one of the children jumped the track, and Jimmy still dropped in and talked things over: “Now, Mammy, you’ve a good business head, I want to know what you think of this? . . .” Old. Cornelia couldn’t change the furniture around without asking. Little things, little things! They had been so sweet when they were little. Granny wished the old days were back again with the children young and everything to be done over. It had been a hard pull, but not too much for her. When she thought of all the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had cut and sewed, and all the gardens she had made—well, the children showed it. There they were, made out of her, and they couldn’t get away from that. Sometimes she wanted to see John again and point to them and say, Well, I didn’t do so badly, did I? But that would have to wait. That was for tomorrow. She used to think of him as a man, but now all the children were older than their father, and he would be a child beside her if she saw him now. It seemed strange and there was something wrong in the idea. Why, he couldn’t possibly recognize her. She had fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wires with just a negro boy to help. That changed a woman. John would be looking for a young woman with the peaked Spanish comb in her hair and the painted fan. Digging post holes changed a woman. Rid- ing country roads in the winter when women had their babies was another thing: sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes and sick children and hardly ever losing one. John, I hardly ever lost one of them! John would see that in a minute, that would be something he could understand, she wouldn’t have to explain anything!

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It made her feel like rolling up her sleeves and putting the whole place to rights again. No matter if Cornelia was determined to be everywhere at once, there were a great many things left undone on this place. She would start tomorrow and do them. It was good to be strong enough for every- thing, even if all you made melted and changed and slipped under your hands, so that by the time you finished you almost forgot what you were working for. What was it I set out to do? she asked herself intently, but she could not remember. A fog rose over the valley, she saw it marching across the creek swallowing the trees and moving up the hill like an army of ghosts. Soon it would be at the near edge of the orchard, and then it was time to go in and light the lamps. Come in, children, don’t stay out in the night air.

Lighting the lamps had been beautiful. The children huddled up to her and breathed like little calves waiting at the bars in the twilight. Their eyes followed the match and watched the flame rise and settle in a blue curve, then they moved away from her. The lamp was lit, they didn’t have to be scared and hang on to mother any more. Never, never, never more. God, for all my life I thank Thee. Without Thee, my God, I could never have done it. Hail, Mary, full of grace.

I want you to pick all the fruit this year and see that nothing is wasted. There’s always someone who can use it. Don’t let good things rot for want of using. You waste life when you waste good food. Don’t let things get lost. It’s bitter to lose things. Now, don’t let me get to thinking, not when I am tired and taking a little nap before supper. . . .

The pillow rose about her shoulders and pressed against her heart and the memory was being squeezed out of it: oh, push down the pillow, somebody: it would smother her if she tried to hold it. Such a fresh breeze blowing and such a green day with no threats in it. But he had not come, just the same. What does a woman do when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn’t come? She tried to remember. No, I swear he never harmed me but in that. He never harmed me but in that . . . and what if he did? There was the day, the day, but a whirl of dark smoke rose and covered it, crept up and over into the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows. That was hell, she knew hell when she saw it. For sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell, and now the two things were mingled in one and the thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head when she had just got rid of Doctor Harry and was trying to rest a minute. Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice in the top of her mind. Don’t let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you. Plenty of girls get jilted. You were jilted, weren’t you? Then stand up to it. Her eyelids wavered and let in streamers

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of blue-gray light like tissue paper over her eyes. She must get up and pull the shades down or she’d never sleep. She was in bed again and the shades were not down. How could that happen? Better turn over, hide from the light, sleeping in the light gave you nightmares. “Mother, how do you feel now?” and a stinging wetness on her forehead. But I don’t like having my face washed in cold water!

Hapsy? George? Lydia? Jimmy? No, Cornelia, and her features were swollen and full of little puddles. “They’re coming, darling, they’ll all be here soon.” Go wash your face, child, you look funny.

Instead of obeying, Cornelia knelt down and put her head on the pillow. She seemed to be talking but there was no sound. “Well, are you tongue-tied? Whose birthday is it? Are you going to give a party?”

Cornelia’s mouth moved urgently in strange shapes. “Don’t do that, you bother me, daughter.”

“Oh, no, Mother. Oh, no. . . .” Nonsense. It was strange about children. They disputed your every

word. “No what, Cornelia?” “Here’s Doctor Harry.” “I won’t see that boy again. He just left five minutes ago.” “That was this morning, Mother. It’s night now. Here’s the nurse.” “This is Doctor Harry, Mrs. Weatherall. I never saw you look so young

and happy!” “Ah, I’ll never be young again—but I’d be happy if they’d let me lie

in peace and get rested.” She thought she spoke up loudly, but no one answered. A warm weight

on her forehead, a warm bracelet on her wrist, and a breeze went on whisper- ing, trying to tell her something. A shuffle of leaves in the everlasting hand of God, He blew on them and they danced and rattled. “Mother, don’t mind, we’re going to give you a little hypodermic.” “Look here, daughter, how do ants get in this bed? I saw sugar ants yesterday.” Did you send for Hapsy too?

It was Hapsy she really wanted. She had to go a long way back through a great many rooms to find Hapsy standing with a baby on her arm. She seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy’s arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting. Then Hapsy melted from within and turned flimsy as gray gauze and the baby was a gauzy shadow, and Hapsy came up close and said, “I thought you’d never come,” and looked at her very searchingly and said, “You haven’t changed a bit!” They leaned forward to kiss, when Cornelia began whispering from a long way off, “Oh, is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anything I can do for you?”

Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him

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I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back. . . . Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges; it bored up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the Doctor now, no more talk, my time has come.

When this one was born it should be the last. The last. It should have been born first, for it was the one she had truly wanted. Everything came in good time. Nothing left out, left over. She was strong, in three days she would be as well as ever. Better. A woman needed milk in her to have her full health.

“Mother, do you hear me?” “I’ve been telling you—” “Mother, Father Connolly’s here.” “I went to Holy Communion only last week. Tell him I’m not so sin-

ful as all that.” “Father just wants to speak to you.” He could speak as much as he pleased. It was like him to drop in

and inquire about her soul as if it were a teething baby, and then stay on for a cup of tea and a round of cards and gossip. He always had a funny story of some sort, usually about an Irishman who made his little mistakes and confessed them, and the point lay in some absurd thing he would blurt out in the confessional showing his struggles between native piety and original sin. Granny felt easy about her soul. Cornelia, where are your manners? Give Father Connolly a chair. She had her secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints who cleared a straight road to God for her. All as surely signed and sealed as the papers for the new Forty Acres. Forever . . . heirs and assigns forever. Since the day the wedding cake was not cut, but thrown out and wasted. The whole bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls fall- ing away. His hand had caught her under the breast, she had not fallen, there was the freshly polished floor with the green rug on it, just as before. He had cursed like a sailor’s parrot and said, “I’ll kill him for you.” Don’t lay a hand on him, for my sake leave something to God. “Now, Ellen, you must believe what I tell you. . . .”

So there was nothing, nothing to worry about any more, except sometimes in the night one of the children screamed in a nightmare, and

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they both hustled out shaking and hunting for the matches and calling, “There, wait a minute, here we are!” John, get the doctor now, Hapsy’s time has come. But there was Hapsy standing by the bed in a white cap. “Cornelia, tell Hapsy to take off her cap. I can’t see her plain.”

Her eyes opened very wide and the room stood out like a picture she had seen somewhere. Dark colors with the shadows rising towards the ceiling in long angles. The tall black dresser gleamed with nothing on it but John’s picture, enlarged from a little one, with John’s eyes very black when they should have been blue. You never saw him, so how do you know how he looked? But the man insisted the copy was perfect, it was very rich and handsome. For a picture, yes, but it’s not my husband. The table by the bed had a linen cover and a candle and a crucifix. The light was blue from Cornelia’s silk lampshades. No sort of light at all, just frippery. You had to live forty years with kerosene lamps to appreciate honest electricity. She felt very strong and she saw Doctor Harry with a rosy nimbus around him.

“You look like a saint, Doctor Harry, and I vow that’s as near as you’ll ever come to it.”

“She’s saying something.” “I heard you, Cornelia. What’s all this carrying-on?” “Father Connolly’s saying—” Cornelia’s voice staggered and bumped like a cart in a bad road. It

rounded corners and turned back again and arrived nowhere. Granny stepped up in the cart very lightly and reached for the reins, but a man sat beside her and she knew him by his hands, driving the cart. She did not look in his face, for she knew without seeing, but looked instead down the road where the trees leaned over and bowed to each other and a thousand birds were singing a Mass. She felt like singing too, but she put her hand in the bosom of her dress and pulled out a rosary, and Father Connolly mur- mured Latin in a very solemn voice and tickled her feet. My God, will you stop that nonsense? I’m a married woman. What if he did run away and leave me to face the priest by myself? I found another a whole world bet- ter. I wouldn’t have exchanged my husband for anybody except St. Michael himself, and you may tell him that for me with a thank you in the bargain.

Light flashed on her closed eyelids, and a deep roaring shook her. Cornelia, is that lightning? I hear thunder. There’s going to be a storm. Close all the windows. Call the children in. . . . “Mother, here we are, all of us.” “Is that you, Hapsy?” “Oh, no, I’m Lydia. We drove as fast as we could.” Their faces drifted above her, drifted away. The rosary fell out of her hands and Lydia put it back. Jimmy tried to help, their hands fumbled together, and Granny closed two fingers around Jimmy’s thumb. Beads wouldn’t do, it must be something alive. She was so amazed her thoughts ran round and round. So, my dear Lord, this is my death and I wasn’t even

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thinking about it. My children have come to see me die. But I can’t, it’s not time. Oh, I always hated surprises. I wanted to give Cornelia the amethyst set—Cornelia, you’re to have the amethyst set, but Hapsy’s to wear it when she wants, and, Doctor Harry, do shut up. Nobody sent for you. Oh, my dear Lord, do wait a minute. I meant to do something about the Forty Acres, Jimmy doesn’t need it and Lydia will later on, with that worthless husband of hers. I meant to finish the altar cloth and send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia for her dyspepsia. I want to send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia, Father Connolly, now don’t let me forget.

Cornelia’s voice made short turns and tilted over and crashed. “Oh, Mother, oh, Mother, oh, Mother. . . .”

“I’m not going, Cornelia. I’m taken by surprise. I can’t go.” You’ll see Hapsy again. What about her? “I thought you’d never

come.” Granny made a long journey outward, looking for Hapsy. What if I don’t find her? What then? Her heart sank down and down, there was no bottom to death, she couldn’t come to the end of it. The blue light from Cornelia’s lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up. God, give a sign!

For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this— I’ll never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Why is stream of consciousness appropriate in this story? What characteristics of Ellen Weatherall’s condition does this narrative technique represent? How effectively does it reveal events of the past? How clearly does it reflect the present? What is gained by the lack of clarity?

2. The protagonist reveals herself to be in conflict with other persons, and with her physical environment, both in the past and in the present. Identify her antagonists. To what extent has she experienced conflicts within herself? To what extent is she now experiencing such conflicts?

3. What does her memory present as the major turning points in her life? Is it more than a coincidence that one of them occurs every twenty years? Consid- ering the many major events in a woman’s life that might have been climactic, how do the ones she recalls so vividly define her character?

4. What kind of life has Granny Weatherall made for herself? What have been her characteristic activities and attitudes? Can her “jilting” be seen as a partial cause for these activities and attitudes?

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5. What is the significance of Hapsy? What religious symbolism is attached to the vision of her and her infant son (paragraph 41)?

6. Most critics understand the title to refer to two “jiltings,” the one by her fiancé sixty years earlier, the other by God at the moment of her death. Can you justify this interpretation? Does the stor y have a determinate or indeterminate ending?

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Hills Like White Elephants The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this

side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

“What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

“It’s pretty hot,” the man said. “Let’s drink beer.” “Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain. “Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway. “Yes. Two big ones.” The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the

felt pads and beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

“They look like white elephants,” she said. “I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer. “No, you wouldn’t have.” “I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have

doesn’t prove anything.” The girl looked at the bead curtain. “They’ve painted something on

it,” she said. “What does it say?” “Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.”

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hills like white elephants First published in 1927. Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was born and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, with summer vacations in northern Michigan. By the time he wrote this story he had been wounded in Italy during World War I; had traveled extensively in Europe as a newspaper correspondent and writer; had married, fathered a son, been divorced, and remarried.

“Could we try it?” The man called “Listen” through the curtain. The woman came out

from the bar. “Four reales.” “We want two Anis del Toro.” “With water?” “Do you want it with water?” “I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?” “It’s all right.” “You want them with water?” asked the woman. “Yes, with water.” “It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down. “That’s the way with everything.” “Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the

things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” “Oh, cut it out.” “You started it,” the girl said. “I was being amused. I was having a

fine time.” “Well, let’s try to have a fine time.” “All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white

elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” “That was bright.” “I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at

things and try new drinks.” “I guess so.” The girl looked across at the hills. “They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white

elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” “Should we have another drink?” “All right.” The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table. “The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said. “It’s lovely,” the girl said. “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not

really an operation at all.” The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just

to let the air in.” The girl did not say anything. “I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the

air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.” “Then what will we do afterward?” “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”

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“What makes you think so?” “That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made

us unhappy.” The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold

of two strings of beads. “And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.” “I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people

that have done it.” “So have I,” said the girl. “And afterward they were all so happy.” “Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t

have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.” “And you really want to?” “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you

don’t really want to.” “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and

you’ll love me?” “I love you now. You know I love you.” “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like

white elephants, and you’ll like it?” “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know

how I get when I worry.” “If I do it you won’t ever worry.” “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.” “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.” “What do you mean?” “I don’t care about me.” “Well, I care about you.” “Oh yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything

will be fine.” “I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.” The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the

other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”

“What did you say?” “I said we could have everything.” “We can have everything.” “No, we can’t.” “We can have the whole world.” “No, we can’t.”

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“We can go everywhere.” “No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.” “It’s ours.” “No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.” “But they haven’t taken it away.” “We’ll wait and see.” “Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.” “I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.” “I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do—” “Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. “I know. Could we have

another beer.” “All right. But you’ve got to realize—” “I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we stop talking?” They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the

dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. “You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if

you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.”

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.” “Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any

one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.” “Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.” “It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.” “Would you do something for me now?” “I’d do anything for you.” “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the sta-

tion. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights. “But I don’t want you to,” he said. “I don’t care anything about it.” “I’ll scream,” said the girl. The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer

and put them down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said.

“What did she say?” asked the girl. “That the train is coming in five minutes.” The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her. “I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man

said. She smiled at him. “All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.” He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the

station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people

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waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

“Do you feel better?” he asked. “I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. The main topic of discussion between the man and the girl is never named. What is the “awfully simple operation”? Why is it not named? What different attitudes are taken toward it by the man and the girl? Why?

2. What is indicated about the past life of the man and the girl? How? What has happened to the quality of their relationship? Why? How do we know? How accurate is the man’s judgment about their future?

3. Though the story consists mostly of dialogue, and though it contains strong emotional conflict, it is entirely without adverbs indicating the tone of the remarks. How does Hemingway indicate tone? At what points are the characters insincere? Self-deceived? Ironic or sarcastic? To what extent do they give open expression to their feelings? Does either want an open conflict? Why or why not? Trace the various phases of emotion in the girl.

4. How sincere is the man in his insistence that he would not have the girl undergo the operation if she does not want to and that he is “perfectly willing to go through with it” if it means anything to the girl? What is “it”? How many times does he repeat these ideas? What significance has the man’s drinking an Anis by himself before rejoining the girl at the end of the story?

5. Much of the conversation seems to be about trivial things (ordering drinks, the weather, and so on). What purposes does this conversation serve? What relevance has the girl’s remark about absinthe?

6. What is the point of the girl’s comparison of the hills to white elephants? Does the remark assume any significance for the reader beyond its significance for the characters? Why does the author use it for his title?

7. What purpose does the setting serve—the hills across the valley, the treeless railroad tracks and station? What is contributed by the precise information about time at the end of the first paragraph?

8. Which of the two characters is more “reasonable”? Which “wins” the conflict between them? The point of view is objective. Does this mean that we cannot tell whether the sympathy of the author lies more with one character than with the other? Explain your answer.

9. According to the definitions presented in this book, what is the point of view used in this story?

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S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. Compare the effectiveness of first-person point of view in any two of the following stories. What contrasting effects do the authors achieve from the different ways they use the first person?

a. Munro, “How I Met My Husband” (page 118). b. Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (page 557). c. Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (page 310). d. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (page 675). e. Oates, “The Scarf ” (page 530).

2. Compare/contrast the use of third-person point of view in any two of the following stories. Does the author use objective, omniscient, or limited? Why is the particular point of view appropriate to each story? Focus on scenes in which the chosen point of view is especially effective.

a. Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow” (page 79). b. Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies” (page 653). c. Mansfield, “Miss Brill” (page 155). d. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (page 279). e. Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (page 392). f. Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (page 502). g. Jackson, “The Lottery” (page 264).

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C H A P T E R S I X

Symbol, Allegory, and Fantasy

Most successful stories are characterized by compression. The writer’s aim is to say as much as possible as briefly as possible. This does not mean that most good stories are brief. It means only that nothing is wasted and that the author chooses each word and detail carefully for maximum effectiveness.

Talented authors achieve compression by exercising a careful selectivity. They choose the details and incidents essential to the story they have to tell and they eliminate any that do not contribute to the unified effect of the story. Because every element in a story must do as much as possible, some details and incidents may serve a variety of purposes at once. A detail that illustrates character at the same time that it advances plot is more useful than a detail that does only one or the other.

Three of the many resources available to writers for achieving compres- sion are symbol, allegory, and fantasy. To varying degrees, each of these techniques is a way to depart from the strict adherence to factual language and representation of the kind a journalist uses, for instance, in writing a newspaper story. By modifying, enhancing, and at times even abandon- ing such a factual or realistic approach to storytelling, an author can increase the emotional force and resonance of a story, suggesting a much larger and richer meaning than might be achieved with a strictly realistic approach. But such narrative strategies also require close attention on the reader’s part.

A literary symbol is something that means more than what it suggests on the surface. It may be an object, a person, a situation, an action, or some other element that has a literal meaning in the story but that suggests or represents other meanings as well. A very simple illustration is that of

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name symbolism. Most names are simply labels. A name, for instance, does not tell much about the person to whom it is attached, except possibly the individual’s nationality or, in the case of first names, the person’s gender. In a story, however, authors may choose names for their characters that not only label them but also suggest something about them. In “A Worn Path,” for instance, the name “Phoenix” has several meanings that are relevant to Welty’s character. In Egyptian mythology, a phoenix was a bird that con- sumed itself by fire after five hundred years, but then rose from its own ashes. It was also employed as a Christian symbol of death and resurrection in the art and architecture of the medieval period. Authors have often used this bird to suggest magical powers of renewal and endurance, and this meaning certainly relates to Phoenix Jackson’s enduring love for her grandson.

More generally, a phoenix also means a person of particular excellence, a meaning also applicable to Welty’s protagonist. In “Everyday Use,” Dee’s rejection of her name and adoption of the alternative “Wangero” symbol- izes for her a changed perspective on her heritage. The name of General Zaroff in “The Most Dangerous Game” is fitting for a former “officer of the Czar” who now behaves like a czar himself. Trevor’s name in Greene’s “The Destructors” suggests his upper-class origins. Equally meaningful in that story is the name of the Wormsley Common Gang. First, the word Common, here designating a small public park or green, also suggests the “common people” or the lower middle and laboring classes as opposed to the upper class. More significant, when Trevor advocates his plan for gut- ting the old house—“We’d do it from inside. . . . We’d be like worms, don’t you see, in an apple” (paragraph 52), we see that Greene’s choice of the name Wormsley was quite deliberate and that it is appropriate also (as well as perfectly natural) that Wormsley Common should have an Under- ground Station. (The word apple, in Trevor’s speech, also has symbolic resonances. Although it is often a mistake to push symbolism too hard, the reader may well ask whether anything would be lost if Trevor had com- pared the gang’s activities to those of worms in a peach or a pear.)

More important than name symbolism is the symbolic use of objects and actions. In some stories these symbols will fit so naturally into the literal context that their symbolic value will not at first be apparent except to the most perceptive reader. In other stories—usually stories with a less realistic surface—they will be so central and so obvious that they will demand symbolical interpretation if the story is to yield significant meaning. In the first kind of story the symbols reinforce and add to the meaning. In the second kind of story they carry the meaning.

Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” superficially concerns a very old woman who walks from the back country into the city, encountering a vari- ety of obstacles on her trip, in order to receive a bottle of soothing medicine

from a charity clinic for her chronically ill grandson. The story has the familiar structure of a journey or quest and, in the old woman’s ability to overcome or avert the dangers that she faces, a kind of mythic power that might remind us of The Odyssey or Pilgrim’s Progress. It is a story of valor, purposefulness, and triumph, as the abiding love of the protagonist gives her the strength and shrewdness to achieve her goal.

But the symbolic meaning is more profound and moving. There are two predominant sets of symbols in the story, one made apparent by repetition, the other gradually developed by realistic details that build by accretion. The first is initially suggested by the symbolic name of the protagonist, “Phoenix” (not uncommon for a black woman in the south at the time of the story). In this example of name symbolism the character thus embodies such qualities as great age, pertinacity, persistence, and the magical ability to renew herself and regain strength and vigor.

Name symbolism, however, is only a beginning point in interpreting “A Worn Path.” It adds grandeur to an otherwise apparently insignifi- cant person, but it also initiates the repetitive references to birds that fill the story. At the onset of her trip, Phoenix’s tapping of her cane sounds like “the chirping of a solitary little bird”; as she begins her journey, she warns “little bobwhites” to avoid being underfoot; and when she hears the “mourning dove” still crying down in the hollow, she symbolically inter- prets it as a parallel to herself: it too has persisted into the winter season. A buzzard among “big dead trees” she interprets as a reminder of death— and she brusquely dismisses it by asking, “ ‘Who you watching?’ ” When she encounters a scarecrow, she first mistakes it for a mysterious dancing man, then for a ghost. As a bird herself she is “scared” by it, then identi- fies it for what it is and dances with it while corn husks “whirl in stream- ers about her skirts,” a festive dance of triumph over this enemy of birds. Immediately after, as she escapes from the “maze” of the dead cornfield into a familiar wagon track, the “quail . . . walking around like pullets, seeming all dainty and unseen” reinforce her victory over fear and confusion.

The next bird that Phoenix sees is one of those same quail, now called “bobwhite,” in the hunter’s bag, with “a little closed claw” and “its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead,” a symbol of the genuine dangers that all mortal birds may face—but not Phoenix, who is not frightened by the foolish, callous hunter pointing his gun at her.

Birds thus symbolize for Phoenix the dangers and the delights of her life, both past and present. They are a well-known population of her world, and all of them embody some meaning for her. She is an interpreter of symbols. She feels protective and pitying toward the vulnerable, and she scorns and dismisses the threatening. There is one bird, however, that truly disturbs her. When by her ruse of inciting a dog-fight so as to pick

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up the nickel dropped by the hunter (who later lies to her about having any money, pretending he wishes to be charitable), Phoenix looks up as she puts the coin in her pocket and sees “a bird [fly] by.” Her interpretation links bird-life to faith and morality: “ ‘God watching me the whole time. I come to stealing.’ ” What birds know and do is to her an intimation of God’s commandments and love.

At the climax of the story, one final symbolic reference to birds reveals the central meaning of the story. After a momentary memory lapse at the charity clinic, Phoenix focuses again on the purpose of her trip, to relieve the suffering of her grandson. “‘We is the only two left in the world,’” she says, meaning that the two of them are the last of their family but also implying their mutual need to sustain each other. She goes on, “ ‘He wear a little patch quilt and peep out holding his mouth open like a little bird.’ ” She is confident that the two of them are “going to last,” the loving spirit of Phoenix ever renewing itself, and the innocent “sweet” child always needing and receiving her self-sacrifice.

There is another symbolic frame of reference in this story, not so obvi- ous but perhaps just as important. Although the bird symbolism enlarges the meaning of Phoenix’s trip to embrace enduring human values that transcend time and place, the story also symbolizes the historical and cultural issue of racial division in America at the time of its writing and in the years before and since the Civil War. Phoenix, who “‘was too old at the Surrender’” (1865) to attend school, and now at over 100 is the old- est person she knows about, spans in her lifetime the period of slavery, emancipation, its aftermath during the Reconstruction, and the era of Jim Crow laws in the south and prejudice and bigotry throughout the country. A diligent reading will reveal a constant recurrence of black and white as words, as implied appearances, and even as moral abstractions. Because they are not always easily associated with right and wrong, good and evil, the references do not constitute an allegorical system but rather a repeated reminder of black–white oppositions. The first of these will suggest the subtlety of this symbolism: in the initial description of Phoenix’s appear- ance, the narrator points out that the hair of this centenarian, falling on her neck “in the frailest of ringlets . . . [is] still black.” Contrary to natural expectations, her hair has not turned white, and her racial identity is intact. Following this implied contrast of black and white, the careful reader will discover many explicit or implicit references to these colors.

Symbolically, the most impressive and touching example occurs dur- ing Phoenix’s dream as she rests after the ordeal of crossing the creek. She sits down, spreads out her skirts, and assumes a girlish posture as she looks around: “Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with

a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. “‘That would be acceptable,’ she said. But when she went to take it there was just her hand in the air.” Here, as if from heaven itself (where the “pearly” gates are as white as the garments of the angels themselves), a “little boy” (perhaps reminiscent of her grandson) offers her a delicacy that displays a perfect mixing of light and dark, a promised harmony of sweet equality—but not yet, not in real life. Phoenix’s understated acceptance of it as a gift offered rather than a right demanded is characteristic of the humble gratitude for small advances that was all too common at the time of the story. As a black woman, she has endured and she will keep enduring the vicissitudes of social change, a reminder of love as a remedy for hatred.

Another example of symbolic setting and action is presented in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a man and a girl sit waiting for the train to Madrid, where the girl is to have an abortion. But the girl is not fully persuaded that she wants an abortion (at the deepest levels of her being, she does not). The man is aware of this and seeks to reassure her: “It’s really an awfully simple operation. . . . It’s not really an operation at all. . . . But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” The man does want her to do it even if she doesn’t really want to; nevertheless, the decision is not irrevocable. They are at a railroad junction, a place where one can change directions. Symbolically it represents a junc- ture where they can change the direction of their lives. Their bags, with “labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights,” indicate the kind of rootless, pleasure-seeking existence without responsibility they have hitherto lived. The man wants the girl to have the abortion so that they can go on living as they have before.

The railway station is situated in a river valley between two mountain ranges. On one side of the valley there is no shade and no trees and the country is “brown and dry.” It is on this side, “the dry side,” that the sta- tion sits in the heat, “between two lines of rails.” It is also this side that the couple see from their table and that prompts the girl’s remark that the hills look “like white elephants.” On the other side of the valley, which the girl can see when she walks to the end of the station, lies the river, with “fields of grain and trees” along its banks, the “shadow of a cloud” mov- ing across a field of grain, and another range of mountains in the distance. Looking in this direction, the girl remarks, “And we could have all this.” The two landscapes, on opposite sides of the valley, have symbolic meaning in relation to the decision that the girl is being asked to reconfirm. The hot arid side of the valley represents sterility; the other side, with water in the river and the cloud, a hint of coolness in the cloud’s moving shadow, and growing things along the river banks, represents fertility. The girl’s remark about this other side shows a conscious recognition of its symbolism.

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But what does the girl mean by her remark that the mountains on the dry side of the valley look “like white elephants”? Perhaps nothing at all. It is intended as a “bright” remark, a clever if far-fetched comparison made to amuse the man, as it would have in their earlier days together. But whether or not the girl means anything by it, almost certainly Hemingway means something. Or perhaps several things. Clearly the child begun in the girl’s womb is a “white elephant” for the man, who says, “I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else.” For the girl, on the other hand, the abortion itself, the decision to continue living as they have been living, without responsibility, may be considered a “white elephant.” We already know that this life has lost its savor for her. When she remarks that the Anis del Toro “tastes like licorice,” the man’s response—“that’s the way with everything”—is probably meant to apply only to the drink and food in this section of the country, but the girl’s confirmation of his observation seems to enlarge its meaning to the whole life they have been living together, which consists, she says, only of looking at things and trying new drinks. Thus the licorice flavor, suggesting tedium and disillusion, joins the “hills like white elephants,” the opposed sides of the river valley, and the railroad junction in a network of symbols that intensify the meaning and impact of the story.

The ability to recognize and identify symbols requires perception and tact. The great danger facing readers when they first become aware of symbolic values is a tendency to run wild—to find symbols everywhere and to read into the details of a story all sorts of fanciful meanings not legitimately supported by it. But we need to remember that most stories operate almost wholly at the literal level and that even in highly symbolic stories, the majority of the details are purely literal. A story is not an excuse for an exercise in ingenuity. It is better, indeed, to miss the symbolic mean- ings of a story than to pervert its meaning by discovering symbols that are nonexistent. Better to miss the boat than to jump wildly for it and drown.

The ability to interpret symbols is nevertheless essential for a full understanding of literature. Readers should always be alert for symbolic meanings but should observe the following cautions:

1. The story itself must furnish a clue that a detail is to be taken sym- bolically. In Mansfield’s story, Miss Brill’s fur is given prominence at the beginning of the story, when it is taken out of its box; at the climax of the story, when the girl on the bench compares it to “a fried whiting”; and at the end of the story, when Miss Brill puts it back in the box and thinks she hears it crying. The fur is clearly a symbol for Miss Brill herself. It comes out of a box like a dark little room or a cupboard, it is old and in need of repair, it is ridiculed by the boy and the girl on the park bench, and it is returned to its box at the end of the story. Symbolically, it is herself whom Miss Brill hears crying. In Welty’s story, the repetition of references to

birds, including the name of the protagonist, signals the need to interpret them symbolically. The title “A Worn Path” explicitly refers to Phoenix’s repeated journeys, and by implication symbolizes the journeys of her race toward love and full acceptance. Both items are emphasized and significant to the meaning of the story, but neither is essential to its plot. Even greater emphasis is given to the quilts in the story by Walker. Symbols nearly always signal their existence by emphasis, repetition, or position. In the absence of such signals, we should be reluctant to identify an item as symbolic.

2. The meaning of a literary symbol must be established and sup- ported by the entire context of the story. The symbol has its meaning in the story, not outside it. For instance, in “A Worn Path,” the meaning of the “pearly cloud of mistletoe” is supported by and dependent on its relation to other references within the story establishing the correlations between black and white and the dreams that Phoenix harbors. In another context a cloud of mistletoe might connote parasitism and the death of the host tree. Here, associated as it is with a proffered gift of delight from on high, the symbol reinforces Phoenix’s faith and reliance on God’s will.

3. To be called a symbol, an item must suggest a meaning different in kind from its literal meaning; a symbol is something more than the representative of a class or type. Miss Brill, for instance, is an old, odd, silent, friendless person, set in her ways, who does not realize (until the cli- max of the story) that she herself is old, odd, and set in her ways—like other elderly people she observes in the park each Sunday. But to say this is to say no more than that the story has a theme. Every literary story suggests a generalization about life, is more than an accounting of the specific fortunes of specific individuals. There is no point, therefore, in calling Miss Brill a symbol of odd, self-deluded elderly people; she is an odd, self-deluded elderly person: a member of the class of odd, self-deluded elderly persons. Her fur is a symbol, but she is not. We ought not to use the phrase is a symbol of when we can easily use is or is an example of or is an evidence of. Phoenix Jackson, in “A Worn Path,” through the symbolic associations attached to her name, is clearly meant to be something more than an example of any class or race of human beings, or of humanity in general; she is a symbol of something within the human spirit, of hidden possibilities latent in many people.

The quilts in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” are evidence that the family has been enslaved and impoverished, evidence of a past that Dee is proud to have escaped. To her, they are valuable as artifacts of oppression. In the story, however, they symbolize a wealth beyond money in the family’s linkages to an authentic heritage of craftsmanship and beauty.

4. A symbol may have more than one meaning. It may suggest a cluster of meanings. At its most effective, a symbol is like a many-faceted jewel: it flashes different colors when turned in the light. This is not to say that it can mean

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anything we want it to: the area of possible meanings is always controlled by the context. Nevertheless, this possibility of complex meaning plus concrete- ness and emotional power gives the symbol its peculiar compressive value. The path in Welty’s story symbolizes life itself, including its obstacles, its habits, its occasional moments of humor, pain, and beauty, and above all its nature as a journey human beings must undertake with as much courage and dignity as possible, motivated by love. The quilts in Walker’s story have an equally wide range of meaning—inherited values, family attachments, independence and self-reliance, the beauty of useful objects, the virtue of craftsmanship—all in contrast to the shallow, monetary meaning expressed in Dee’s acquisitive demand for them. When she says, “But they’re priceless!” she means that they are worth a great deal of money, but in the truer sense their symbolic values cannot be reckoned at any price. The meaning is not confined to any one of these qualities: it is all of them, and therein lies the symbol’s value.

An allegory is a story that has a second meaning beneath the surface, endowing a cluster of characters, objects, or events with added significance; often the pattern relates each literal item to a corresponding abstract idea or moral principle. It is different from symbolism in that it puts less emphasis on the literal meanings and more on the ulterior meanings. Also, those ulterior meanings are more fixed, and they usually constitute a pre-existing system of ideas or principles. Medieval and Renaissance religious allegories, for instance, were intended to illustrate the progress of a typical Christian individual through life, as in the medieval play Everyman and in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a seventeenth-century work in which a character named “Christian” journeys toward salvation, encountering along the way such temptations as despair, labeled “The Slough of Despond,” and witnessing human hypocrisy in a town called “Fair Speech.”

Probably the most widely read allegorical work today is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). Although Hawthorne’s novel, like most more modern allegories, eschews the mechanical, one-to-one correspon- dences found in older allegorical works (which were written more for religious or political than literary purposes), he does provide a coherent system that evokes and critiques the seventeenth-century Puritan world in which the novel is set. The novel’s allegorical pattern includes the scarlet “A” for adultery that Hester Prynne wears on her dress; the names of her husband, Chillingworth, and her daughter, Pearl; Hester’s uneasy residence on the border between the wilderness, representing natural impulses, and the “civilized” Puritan culture that ostracizes her. In Part 2, Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown” has a similar allegorical pattern. The title character, as his name suggests, is a typical young and virtuous man; his surname “Brown,” like “Smith” in America today, is the most common name during his era, again suggesting his identity as a representative individual. His wife, “Faith,” represents the

steadfast virtue he is leaving behind during his journey into the wilderness, just as her pink ribbons suggest her innocence. During a crisis point in the story, Brown shouts, “My Faith is gone!” and the allegorical meaning is clear, for he is talking simultaneously about his literal wife and the abstraction of his religious faith. Other elements in the story—the old man’s staff that begins “writhing” like a serpent, the wilderness itself with its suggestions of moral chaos and depravity—likewise fulfill roles in Hawthorne’s allegory.

It should be stressed, however, that an author employing allegory usu- ally does not intend simply to create two levels of reality, one literal and one abstract, which readers merely identify as though connecting a series of dots. Serious writers often introduce an element of ambiguity into their allegorical meanings, undercutting easy and simplistic interpretation. For example, in Hawthorne’s story, Brown’s innocent wife Faith pleads with her husband not to undertake the journey, observing, “A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeared of herself sometimes”—a bit of dialogue that suggests her identity as more than an abstract representation of faith but also as a flesh-and-blood woman who may well encounter her own temptations and psychological turmoil when separated from her husband.

The creation of an allegorical pattern of meaning enables an author to achieve power through economy. Reading a story, you should therefore be aware of an author’s use of description and detail, for these may be present not only to create a sensual apprehension of a story’s characters and settings, but also to suggest meanings—moral, intellectual, emotional—beyond that reality. This ability to compress a great deal of meaning into the rela- tively small canvas of a short story is part of what gives the best examples of this genre their powerful narrative impact.

Although some stories use factual details to suggest additional, some- times abstract, meanings, there is another type of story that abandons factual representation altogether. The nonrealistic story, or fantasy, is one that transcends the bounds of known reality. After all, truth in fiction is not the same as fidelity to fact. All fiction is essentially a game of make-believe in which the author imaginatively conceives characters and situations and sets them down on paper. The purpose of any literary artist is to com- municate truths by means of imagined facts. Most authors, using realistic means, attempt to create an illusion of reality in telling their stories, care- ful to stay in the realm of the plausible and relate something that could have happened. But sometimes an author chooses to go a step further and create a story that is entirely implausible or even impossible. Such stories require from the reader what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “a willing suspension of disbelief ”: that is, the reader is willing to accept the author’s premise of a strange and marvelous world, in which a character falls down a rabbit hole or climbs up a beanstalk or finds himself in an alien spaceship.

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Such a fantasy story introduces human beings into a world where the ordi- nary laws of nature are suspended or superseded and where the landscape and its creatures are unfamiliar; or, on the other hand, it may introduce ghosts, fairies, dragons, werewolves, talking animals, Martian invaders, or miraculous occurrences into the recognizable, everyday world of human beings. A recently popular form of this second approach to fantasy has been called “magical realism,” in which fantastic and magical events are woven into mundane and ordinary situations, creating striking and memorable effects unavailable to either realism or fantasy alone. Such popular forms of storytelling as fables, ghost stories, and science fiction are all types of fantasy. Like stories using symbolism and allegory, fantasy stories are often highly compressed, enabling the author to convey a richly textured, reso- nant vision within a relatively short narrative.

The story writer begins, then, by saying, “What if . . . .” “What if,” for instance, “a young, somewhat naïve girl working in a farmhouse should meet a handsome pilot visiting the area and become infatuated with him.” From this initial assumption the author goes on to develop a story (“How I Met My Husband”), which, though presumably imaginary in the sense that it never happened, nevertheless reveals convincingly to us some truths of human behavior.

But now, what if the author goes a step further and supposes not just something that might very well have happened (though it didn’t) but something highly improbable—something that could happen, say, only as the result of a very surprising coincidence? What if he begins, “Let’s suppose that a misogynist and a charming woman find themselves alone on a desert island”? This initial supposition causes us to stretch our imagi- nations a bit further, but is not this situation just as capable of revealing human truths as the former? The psychologist puts a rat in a maze (cer- tainly an improbable situation for a rat), observes its reactions to the maze, and discovers some truth of rat behavior. The author may put imaginary characters on an imagined desert island, imaginatively study their reac- tions, and reveal some truth of human nature. The improbable initial situ- ation may yield as much truth as the probable one.

From the improbable it is but one step further to the impossible (as we know it in this life). Why should our author not begin “Let’s suppose that a miser and his termagant wife find themselves in hell” or “Let’s suppose that a primitive scapegoat ritual still survives in contemporary America.” Could not these situations also be used to exhibit human traits?

Like stories employing realistic characters and events, fantasies may be purely commercial entertainment or they may be serious literary works. A story about a spaceship on its way to a distant planet might be filled with stock characters or with richly imagined human beings; it may be designed

chiefly to exhibit mechanical marvels and to provide thrills and adventures, or it may be a way of creating a setting in which human behavior can be sharply observed and studied. Fantasy, like other forms of fiction, may be employed sheerly for its own sake or as a means of communicating significant insights into the world of human beings. The important point to remember is that truth in fiction is not to be identified with a realistic method. Stories that fly on the wings of fantasy may be vehicles for truth that are as power- ful in their own way as such realistic stories as “Hunters in the Snow” or “Interpreter of Maladies.” Fantasy may employ the techniques of symbolism or allegory, or it may simply provide an exotic, nonrealistic setting as a way of observing human nature. Some of the world’s greatest works of literature have been partly or wholly fantasy: The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, The Tempest, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, and Alice in Wonderland all offer profound and significant insights into the human condition.

Clearly, then, we must not judge a story as good or bad according to whether or not it stays within the limits of the possible. Rather, we should begin reading any story by suspending disbelief—that is, by grant- ing every story its initial premise or assumption. The writer may begin with an ordinary, everyday situation or with a far-fetched, improbable coincidence. Or the writer may be allowed to suspend a law of nature or to create a marvelous being or machine or place. But once we have accepted an impossible reality as a premise, we have a right to demand probability and consistency in the author’s treatment of it. Fantasy is not an excuse for haphazard writing or a poorly imagined story. We need to ask, too, for what reason the story employs fantasy. Is it used simply for its own strangeness, or for thrills or surprises or laughs? Or is it used to illuminate truths of the reader’s own experience? What, finally, is the purpose of the author’s fantas- tic invention? Is it, like a roller coaster, simply a machine for producing a temporary thrill? Or does it, like an observation balloon, provide a unique vantage point that may change our view of the world forever?

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R S I X

1. Review the definition of a literary symbol. 2. Explore the uses of symbolic names, objects, and actions. 3. Summarize the use of symbolism in Welty’s “A Worn Path.” 4. Distinguish between symbolism and allegory. 5. Describe the importance of ambiguity in a literary allegory. 6. Define the term “fantasy” and describe the prominent features of a

fantastic story.

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D. H. LAWRENCE

The Rocking-Horse Winner There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the

advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Never- theless, when her children were present, she always felt the center of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and in her manner she was all the more gentle and anxious for her children, as if she loved them very much. Only she herself knew that at the center of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody. Everybody else said of her: “She is such a good mother. She adores her children.” Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so. They read it in each other’s eyes.

There were a boy and two little girls. They lived in a pleasant house, with a garden, and they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighborhood.

Although they lived in style, they felt always an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money. The mother had a small income, and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for the social position which they had to keep up. The father went into town to some office. But though he had good prospects, these prospects never materialized. There was always the grinding sense of the shortage of money, though the style was always kept up.

At last the mother said: “I will see if I can’t make something.” But she did not know where to begin. She racked her brains, and tried this thing and the other, but could not find anything successful. The failure made deep lines come into her face. Her children were growing up, they would have to go to school. There must be more money, there must be more money. The father, who was always very handsome and expensive in his tastes, seemed as if he never would be able to do anything worth doing. And the mother, who had a great belief in herself, did not succeed any better, and her tastes were just as expensive.

And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time, though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas,

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THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER First published in 1933. D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), son of a coal miner and a school teacher, was born and grew up in Nottinghamshire, England, was rejected for military service in World War I because of lung trouble, and lived most of his adult life abroad, including parts of three years in New Mexico.

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when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking horse, behind the smart doll’s-house, a voice would start whispering: “There must be more money! There must be more money!” And the children would stop playing, to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard. “There must be more money! There must be more money!”

It came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden, champing head, heard it. The big doll, sitting so pink and smirking in her new pram, could hear it quite plainly, and seemed to be smirking all the more self-consciously because of it. The foolish puppy, too, that took the place of the Teddy bear, he was looking so extraordinarily foolish for no other reason but that he heard the secret whisper all over the house: “There must be more money!”

Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and there- fore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: “We are breathing!” in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.

“Mother,” said the boy Paul one day, “why don’t we keep a car of our own? Why do we always use uncle’s, or else a taxi?”

“Because we’re the poor members of the family,” said the mother. “But why are we, mother?” “Well—I suppose,” she said slowly and bitterly, “it’s because your

father has no luck.” The boy was silent for some time. “Is luck money, mother?” he asked, rather timidly. “No, Paul. Not quite. It’s what causes you to have money.” “Oh!” said Paul vaguely. “I thought when Uncle Oscar said filthy

lucker, it meant money.” “Filthy lucre° does mean money,” said the mother. “But it’s lucre, not

luck.” “Oh!” said the boy. “Then what is luck, mother?” “It’s what causes you to have money. If you’re lucky you have money.

That’s why it’s better to be born lucky than rich. If you’re rich, you may lose your money. But if you’re lucky, you will always get more money.”

“Oh! Will you? And is father not lucky?” “Very unlucky, I should say,” she said bitterly. The boy watched her with unsure eyes. “Why?” he asked. “I don’t know. Nobody ever knows why one person is lucky and

another unlucky.”

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filthy lucre: money, especially gained dishonestly. (See 1 Timothy 3:3.)

“Don’t they? Nobody at all? Does nobody know?” “Perhaps God. But He never tells.” “He ought to, then. And aren’t you lucky either, mother?” “I can’t be, if I married an unlucky husband.” “But by yourself, aren’t you?” “I used to think I was, before I married. Now I think I am very

unlucky indeed.” “Why?” “Well—never mind! Perhaps I’m not really,” she said. The child looked at her, to see if she meant it. But he saw, by the lines

of her mouth, that she was only trying to hide something from him. “Well, anyhow,” he said stoutly, “I’m a lucky person.” “Why?” said his mother, with a sudden laugh. He stared at her. He didn’t even know why he had said it. “God told me,” he asserted, brazening it out. “I hope He did, dear!” she said, again with a laugh, but rather bitter. “He did, mother!” “Excellent!” said the mother, using one of her husband’s exclamations. The boy saw she did not believe him; or, rather, that she paid no

attention to his assertion. This angered him somewhat, and made him want to compel her attention.

He went off by himself, vaguely, in a childish way, seeking for the clue to “luck.” Absorbed, talking no heed of other people, he went about with a sort of stealth, seeking inwardly for luck. He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery, he would sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily. Wildly the horse careered, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, his eyes had a strange glare in them. The little girls dared not speak to him.

When he had ridden to the end of his mad little journey, he climbed down and stood in front of his rocking horse, staring fixedly into its lowered face. Its red mouth was slightly open, its big eye was wide and glassy-bright.

“Now!” he would silently command the snorting steed. “Now, take me to where there is luck! Now take me!”

And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip he had asked Uncle Oscar for. He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it. So he would mount again, and start on his furious ride, hoping at last to get there. He knew he could get there.

“You’ll break your horse, Paul!” said the nurse. “He’s always riding like that! I wish he’d leave off!” said his elder

sister Joan.

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But he only glared down on them in silence. Nurse gave him up. She could make nothing of him. Anyhow he was growing beyond her.

One day his mother and his Uncle Oscar came in when he was on one of his furious rides. He did not speak to them.

“Hallo, you young jockey! Riding a winner?” said his uncle. “Aren’t you growing too big for a rocking horse? You’re not a very

little boy any longer, you know,” said his mother. But Paul only gave a blue glare from his big, rather close-set eyes. He

would speak to nobody when he was in full tilt. His mother watched him with an anxious expression on her face.

At last he suddenly stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop, and slid down.

“Well, I got there!” he announced fiercely, his blue eyes still flaring, and his sturdy long legs straddling apart.

“Where did you get to?” asked his mother. “Where I wanted to go,” he flared back at her. “That’s right, son!” said Uncle Oscar. “Don’t you stop till you get

there. What’s the horse’s name?” “He doesn’t have a name,” said the boy. “Gets on without all right?” asked the uncle. “Well, he has different names. He was called Sansovino last week.” “Sansovino, eh? Won the Ascot. How did you know his name?” “He always talks about horse races with Bassett,” said Joan. The uncle was delighted to find that his small nephew was posted with

all the racing news. Bassett, the young gardener, who had been wounded in the left foot in the war and got his present job through Oscar Cresswell, whose batman° he had been, was a perfect blade of the “turf.”° He lived in the racing events, and the small boy lived with him.

Oscar Cresswell got it all from Bassett. “Master Paul comes and asks me, so I can’t do more than tell him, sir,”

said Bassett, his face terribly serious, as if he were speaking of religious matters.

“And does he ever put anything on a horse he fancies?” “Well—I don’t want to give him away—he’s a young sport, a fine

sport, sir. Would you mind asking him yourself? He sort of takes a pleasure in it, and perhaps he’d feel I was giving him away, sir, if you don’t mind.”

Bassett was serious as a church. The uncle went back to his nephew, and took him off for a ride in the car. “Say, Paul, old man, do you ever put anything on a horse?” the uncle

asked.

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batman: orderly assigned to an officer as a personal servant was a perfect blade of the “turf”: fit right in; “turf” additionally signifies courses for horse racing

The boy watched the handsome man closely. “Why, do you think I oughtn’t to?” he parried. “Not a bit of it! I thought perhaps you might give me a tip for the

Lincoln.” The car sped on into the country, going down to Uncle Oscar’s place

in Hampshire. “Honor bright?” said the nephew. “Honor bright, son!” said the uncle. “Well, then, Daffodil.” “Daffodil! I doubt it, sonny. What about Mirza?” “I only know the winner,” said the boy. “That’s Daffodil.” “Daffodil, eh?” There was a pause. Daffodil was an obscure horse comparatively. “Uncle!” “Yes, son?” “You won’t let it go any further, will you? I promised Bassett.” “Bassett be damned, old man! What’s he got to do with it?” “We’re partners. We’ve been partners from the first. Uncle, he lent

me my first five shillings, which I lost. I promised him, honor bright, it was only between me and him; only you gave me that ten-shilling note I started winning with, so I thought you were lucky. You won’t let it go any further, will you?”

The boy gazed at his uncle from those big, hot, blue eyes, set rather close together. The uncle stirred and laughed uneasily.

“Right you are, son! I’ll keep your tip private. Daffodil, eh? How much are you putting on him?”

“All except twenty pounds,” said the boy. “I keep that in reserve.” The uncle thought it a good joke. “You keep twenty pounds in reserve, do you, you young romancer?

What are you betting, then?” “I’m betting three hundred,” said the boy gravely. “But it’s between

you and me, Uncle Oscar! Honor bright?” The uncle burst into a roar of laughter. “It’s between you and me all right, you young Nat Gould,”° he said,

laughing. “But where’s your three hundred?” “Bassett keeps it for me. We’re partners.” “You are, are you! And what is Bassett putting on Daffodil?” “He won’t go quite as high as I do, I expect. Perhaps he’ll go a hundred

and fifty.” “What, pennies?” laughed the uncle.

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Nat Gould: a journalist and novelist (1857–1919) who wrote about horse racing

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“Pounds,” said the child, with a surprised look at his uncle. “Bassett keeps a bigger reserve than I do.”

Between wonder and amusement Uncle Oscar was silent. He pursued the matter no further, but he determined to take his nephew with him to the Lincoln races.

“Now, son,” he said, “I’m putting twenty on Mirza, and I’ll put five for you on any horse you fancy. What’s your pick?”

“Daffodil, uncle.” “No, not the fiver on Daffodil!” “I should if it was my own fiver,” said the child. “Good! Good! Right you are! A fiver for me and a fiver for you on

Daffodil.” The child had never been to a race meeting before, and his eyes were

blue fire. He pursed his mouth tight, and watched. A Frenchman just in front had put his money on Lancelot. Wild with excitement, he flayed his arms up and down, yelling “Lancelot! Lancelot!” in his French accent.

Daffodil came in first, Lancelot second, Mirza third. The child, flushed and with eyes blazing, was curiously serene. His uncle brought him four five-pound notes, four to one.

“What am I to do with these?” he cried, waving them before the boy’s eyes.

“I suppose we’ll talk to Bassett,” said the boy. “I expect I have fifteen hundred now; and twenty in reserve; and this twenty.”

His uncle studied him for some moments. “Look here, son!” he said. “You’re not serious about Bassett and that

fifteen hundred, are you?” “Yes, I am. But it’s between you and me, uncle. Honor bright!” “Honor bright all right, son! But I must talk to Bassett.” “If you’d like to be a partner, uncle, with Bassett and me, we could all

be partners. Only, you’d have to promise, honor bright, uncle, not to let it go beyond us three. Bassett and I are lucky, and you must be lucky, because it was your ten shillings I started winning with . . .”

Uncle Oscar took both Bassett and Paul into Richmond Park for an afternoon, and there they talked.

“It’s like this, you see, sir,” Bassett said. “Master Paul would get me talking about racing events, spinning yarns, you know, sir. And he was always keen on knowing if I’d made or if I’d lost. It’s about a year since, now, that I put five shillings on Blush of Dawn for him—and we lost. Then the luck turned, with that ten shillings he had from you, that we put on Singhalese. And since that time, it’s been pretty steady, all things considering. What do you say, Master Paul?”

“We’re all right when we’re sure,” said Paul. “It’s when we’re not quite sure that we go down.”

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“Oh, but we’re careful then,” said Bassett. “But when are you sure?” smiled Uncle Oscar. “It’s Master Paul, sir,” said Bassett, in a secret, religious voice. “It’s as

if he had it from heaven. Like Daffodil, now, for the Lincoln. That was as sure as eggs.”

“Did you put anything on Daffodil?” asked Oscar Cresswell. “Yes, sir, I made my bit.” “And my nephew?” Bassett was obstinately silent, looking at Paul. “I made twelve hundred, didn’t I, Bassett? I told uncle I was putting

three hundred on Daffodil.” “That’s right,” said Bassett, nodding. “But where’s the money?” asked the uncle. “I keep it safe locked up, sir. Master Paul he can have it any minute

he likes to ask for it.” “What, fifteen hundred pounds?” “And twenty! and forty, that is, with the twenty he made on the

course.” “It’s amazing!” said the uncle. “If Master Paul offers you to be partners, sir, I would, if I were you; if

you’ll excuse me,” said Bassett. Oscar Cresswell thought about it. “I’ll see the money,” he said. They drove home again, and sure enough, Bassett came round to the

garden-house with fifteen hundred pounds in notes. The twenty pounds reserve was left with Joe Glee, in the Turf Commission deposit.

“You see, it’s all right, uncle, when I’m sure! Then we go strong, for all we’re worth. Don’t we Bassett?”

“We do that, Master Paul.” “And when are you sure?” said the uncle, laughing. “Oh, well, sometimes I’m absolutely sure, like about Daffodil,” said

the boy; “and sometimes I have an idea; and sometimes I haven’t even an idea, have I, Bassett? Then we’re careful, because we mostly go down.”

“You do, do you! And when you’re sure, like about Daffodil, what makes you sure, sonny?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know,” said the boy uneasily. “I’m sure, you know, uncle; that’s all.”

“It’s as if he had it from heaven, sir,” Bassett reiterated. “I should say so!” said the uncle. But he became a partner. And when the Leger was coming on, Paul

was “sure” about Lively Spark, which was a quite inconsiderable horse. The boy insisted on putting a thousand on the horse, Bassett went for five hundred, and Oscar Cresswell two hundred. Lively Spark came in

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first, and the betting had been ten to one against him. Paul had made ten thousand.

“You see,” he said, “I was absolutely sure of him.” Even Oscar Cresswell had cleared two thousand. “Look here son,” he said, “this sort of thing makes me nervous.” “It needn’t, uncle! Perhaps I shan’t be sure again for a long time.” “But what are you going to do with your money?” asked the uncle. “Of course,” said the boy, “I started it for mother. She said she had no

luck, because father is unlucky, so I thought if I was lucky, it might stop whispering.”

“What might stop whispering?” “Our house. I hate our house for whispering.” “What does it whisper?” “Why—why”—the boy fidgeted—“why, I don’t know. But it’s always

short of money, you know, uncle.” “I know it, son, I know it.” “You know people send mother writs,° don’t you, uncle?” “I’m afraid I do,” said the uncle. “And then the house whispers, like people laughing at you behind

your back. It’s awful, that is! I thought if I was lucky . . .” “You might stop it,” added the uncle. The boy watched him with big blue eyes that had an uncanny cold fire

in them, and he said never a word. “Well, then!” said the uncle. “What are we doing?” “I shouldn’t like mother to know I was lucky,” said the boy. “Why not, son?” “She’d stop me.” “I don’t think she would.” “Oh!”—and the boy writhed in an odd way—“I don’t want her to

know, uncle.” “All right, son! We’ll manage it without her knowing.” They managed it very easily. Paul, at the other’s suggestion, handed

over five thousand pounds to his uncle, who deposited it with the family lawyer, who was then to inform Paul’s mother that a relative had put five thousand pounds into his hands, which sum was to be paid out a thousand pounds at a time, on the mother’s birthday, for the next five years.

“So she’ll have a birthday present of a thousand pounds for five successive years,” said Uncle Oscar. “I hope it won’t make it all the harder for her later.”

Paul’s mother had her birthday in November. The house had been “whispering” worse than ever lately, and, even in spite of his luck, Paul

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writs: notifications of legal actions, as for debts owed

could not bear up against it. He was very anxious to see the effect of the birthday letter telling his mother about the thousand pounds.

When there were no visitors, Paul now took his meals with his par- ents, as he was beyond the nursery control. His mother went into town nearly every day. She had discovered that she had an odd knack of sketching furs and dress materials, so she worked secretly in the studio of a friend who was the chief “artist” for the leading drapers.° She drew the figures of ladies in furs and ladies in silk and sequins for the newspaper advertisements. This young woman artist earned several thousand pounds a year, but Paul’s mother only made several hundreds, and she was again dissatisfied. She so wanted to be first in something, and she did not succeed, even in making sketches for drapery advertisements.

She was down to breakfast on the morning of her birthday. Paul watched her face as she read her letters. He knew the lawyer’s letter. As his mother read it, her face hardened and became more expressionless. Then a cold, determined look came on her mouth. She hid the letter under the pile of others, and said not a word about it.

“Didn’t you have anything nice in the post for your birthday, mother?” said Paul.

“Quite moderately nice,” she said, her voice cold and absent. She went away to town without saying more. But in the afternoon Uncle Oscar appeared. He said Paul’s mother had

had a long interview with the lawyer, asking if the whole five thousand could be advanced at once, as she was in debt.

“What do you think, uncle?” said the boy. “I leave it to you, son.” “Oh, let her have it, then! We can get some more with the other,” said

the boy. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, laddie!” said Uncle

Oscar. “But I’m sure to know for the Grand National; or the Lincolnshire; or

else the Derby. I’m sure to know for one of them,” said Paul. So Uncle Oscar signed the agreement, and Paul’s mother touched the

whole five thousand. Then something very curious happened. The voices in the house suddenly went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening. There were certain new furnishings, and Paul had a tutor. He was really going to Eton,° his father’s school, in the following autumn. There were flowers in the winter, and a blossoming of the luxury Paul’s mother had been used to. And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of mimosa

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drapers: clothiers Eton: England’s most prestigious privately supported school

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and almond blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: “There must be more money! Oh-h-h, there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w— there must be more money—more than ever! More than ever!”

It frightened Paul terribly. He studied away at his Latin and Greek with his tutor. But his intense hours were spent with Bassett. The Grand National had gone by: he had not “known,” and had lost a hundred pounds. Summer was at hand. He was in agony for the Lincoln. But even for the Lincoln he didn’t “know” and he lost fifty pounds. He became wild-eyed and strange, as if something were going to explode in him.

“Let it alone, son! Don’t you bother about it!” urged Uncle Oscar. But it was as if the boy couldn’t really hear what his uncle was saying.

“I’ve got to know for the Derby! I’ve got to know for the Derby!” the child reiterated, his big blue eyes blazing with a sort of madness.

His mother noticed how overwrought he was. “You’d better go to the seaside. Wouldn’t you like to go now to the

seaside, instead of waiting? I think you’d better,” she said, looking down at him anxiously, her heart curiously heavy because of him.

But the child lifted his uncanny blue eyes. “I couldn’t possibly go before the Derby, mother!” he said. “I couldn’t

possibly!” “Why not?” she said, her voice becoming heavy when she was opposed.

“Why not? You can still go from the seaside to see the Derby with your Uncle Oscar, if that’s what you wish. No need for you to wait here. Besides, I think you care too much about these races. It’s a bad sign. My family has been a gambling family, and you won’t know till you grow up how much damage it has done. But it has done damage. I shall have to send Bassett away, and ask Uncle Oscar not to talk racing to you, unless you promise to be reasonable about it; go away to the seaside and forget it. You’re all nerves!”

“I’ll do what you like, mother, so long as you don’t send me away till after the Derby,” the boy said.

“Send you away from where? Just from this house?” “Yes,” he said, gazing at her. “Why, you curious child, what makes you care about this house so

much, suddenly? I never knew you loved it.” He gazed at her without speaking. He had a secret within a secret,

something he had not divulged, even to Bassett or to his Uncle Oscar. But his mother, after standing undecided and a little bit sullen for

some moments, said: “Very well, then! Don’t go to the seaside till after the Derby, if you don’t

wish it. But promise me you won’t let your nerves go to pieces. Promise you won’t think so much about horse racing and events, as you call them!”

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“Oh, no,” said the boy casually. “I won’t think much about them, mother. You needn’t worry. I wouldn’t worry, mother, if I were you.”

“If you were me and I were you,” said his mother, “I wonder what we should do!”

“But you know you needn’t worry, mother, don’t you?” the boy repeated.

“I should be awfully glad to know it,” she said wearily. “Oh, well, you can, you know. I mean, you ought to know you needn’t

worry,” he insisted. “Ought I? Then I’ll see about it,” she said. Paul’s secret of secrets was his wooden horse, that which had no name.

Since he was emancipated from a nurse and a nursery-governess, he had had his rocking horse removed to his own bedroom at the top of the house.

“Surely, you’re too big for a rocking horse!” his mother had remonstrated. “Well, you see mother, till I can have a real horse, I like to have some

sort of animal about,” had been his quaint answer. “Do you feel he keeps you company?” she laughed. “Oh, yes! He’s very good, he always keeps me company, when I’m

there,” said Paul. So the horse, rather shabby, stood in an arrested prance in the boy’s

bedroom. The Derby was drawing near, and the boy grew more and more tense.

He hardly heard what was spoken to him, he was very frail, and his eyes were really uncanny. His mother had sudden seizures of uneasiness about him. Sometimes, for half-an-hour, she would feel a sudden anxiety about him that was almost anguish. She wanted to rush to him at once, and know he was safe.

Two nights before the Derby, she was at a big party in town, when one of her rushes of anxiety about her boy, her first-born, gripped her heart till she could hardly speak. She fought with the feeling, might and main, for she believed in common sense. But it was too strong. The children’s nursery- governess was terribly surprised and startled at being rung up in the night.

“Are the children all right, Miss Wilmot?” “Oh, yes, they are quite all right.” “Master Paul? Is he all right?” “He went to bed as right as a trivet. Shall I run up and look at him?” “No,” said Paul’s mother reluctantly. “No! Don’t trouble. It’s all right.

Don’t sit up. We shall be home fairly soon.” She did not want her son’s privacy intruded upon.

“Very good,” said the governess. It was about one o’clock when Paul’s mother and father drove up to

their house. All was still. Paul’s mother went to her room and slipped off

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her white fur coat. She had told her maid not to wait up for her. She heard her husband downstairs, mixing a whiskey-and-soda.

And then, because of the strange anxiety at her heart, she stole upstairs to her son’s room. Noiselessly she went along the upper corridor. Was there a faint noise? What was it?

She stood, with arrested muscles, outside his door listening. There was a strange, heavy, and yet not loud noise. Her heart stood still. It was a soundless noise, yet rushing and powerful. Something huge, in violent, hushed motion. What was it? What in God’s name was it? She ought to know. She felt that she knew the noise. She knew what it was.

Yet she could not place it. She couldn’t say what it was. And on and on it went, like madness.

Softly, frozen with anxiety and fear, she turned the door handle. The room was dark. Yet in the space near the window, she heard and

saw something plunging to and fro. She gazed in fear and amazement. Then suddenly she switched on the light, and saw her son, in his green

pajamas, madly surging on the rocking horse. The blaze of light suddenly lit him up, as he urged the wooden horse, and lit her up, as she stood, blonde, in her dress of pale green and crystal, in the doorway.

“Paul!” she cried. “Whatever are you doing?” “It’s Malabar!” he screamed, in a powerful, strange voice. “It’s Malabar.” His eyes blazed at her for one strange and senseless second, as he

ceased urging his wooden horse. Then he fell with a crash to the ground, and she, all her tormented motherhood flooding upon her, rushed to gather him up.

But he was unconscious, and unconscious he remained, with some brain-fever. He talked and tossed, and his mother sat stonily by his side.

“Malabar! It’s Malabar! Bassett, Bassett, I know it! It’s Malabar!” So the child cried, trying to get up and urge the rocking horse that

gave him his inspiration. “What does he mean by Malabar?” asked the heart-frozen mother. “I don’t know,” said his father stonily. “What does he mean by Malabar?” she asked her brother Oscar. “It’s one of the horses running for the Derby,” was the answer. And, in spite of himself, Oscar Cresswell spoke to Bassett, and himself

put a thousand on Malabar: at fourteen to one. The third day of the illness was critical: they were waiting for a

change. The boy, with his rather long, curly hair, was tossing ceaselessly on the pillow. He neither slept nor regained consciousness, and his eyes were like blue stones. His mother sat, feeling her heart had gone, turned actually into a stone.

In the evening, Oscar Cresswell did not come, but Bassett sent a message, saying could he come up for one moment, just one moment?

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Paul’s mother was very angry at the intrusion, but on second thought she agreed. The boy was the same. Perhaps Bassett might bring him to consciousness.

The gardener, a shortish fellow with a brown mustache, and sharp little brown eyes, tiptoed into the room, touched his imaginary cap to Paul’s mother, and stole to the bedside, staring with glittering, smallish eyes, at the tossing, dying child.

“Master Paul!” he whispered. “Master Paul! Malabar came in first all right, a clean win. I did as you told me. You’ve made over seventy thousand pounds, you have; you’ve got over eighty thousand. Malabar came in all right, Master Paul.”

“Malabar! Malabar! Did I say Malabar, mother? Did I say Malabar? Do you think I’m lucky, mother? I knew Malabar, didn’t I? Over eighty thou- sand pounds! I call that lucky, don’t you, mother? Over eighty thousand pounds! I knew, didn’t I know I knew? Malabar came in all right. If I ride my horse till I’m sure, then I tell you, Bassett, you can go as high as you like. Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?”

“I went a thousand on it, Master Paul.” “I never told you, mother, that if I can ride my horse, and get there,

then I’m absolutely sure—oh, absolutely! Mother, did I ever tell you? I’m lucky.”

“No, you never did,” said the mother. But the boy died in the night. And even as he lay dead, his mother heard her brother’s voice saying to

her: “My God, Hester, you’re eighty-odd thousand to the good and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking horse to find a winner.”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. In the phraseology of its beginning (“There was a woman . . .”), its simple style, its direct characterization, and its use of the wish motif—especially that of the wish that is granted only on conditions that nullify its desirability (compare the story of King Midas)—this story has the qualities of a fairy tale. Its differences, however—in characterization, setting, and ending—are especially significant. What do they tell us about the purpose of the story?

2. Characterize the mother fully. How does she differ from the stepmothers in fairy tales like “Cinderella” and “Hansel and Gretel”? How does the boy’s mistake about filthy lucker (paragraph 15) clarify her thinking and her motivations? Why had her love for her husband turned to dust? Why is she “unlucky”?

3. What kind of a child is Paul? What are his motivations? 4. The initial assumptions of the story are that (a) a boy might get divinatory

powers by riding a rocking horse and (b) a house can whisper. Could the second of these be accepted as little more than a metaphor? Once we have granted these initial assumptions, does the story develop plausibly?

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5. It is ironic that the boy’s attempt to stop the whispers should only increase them. Is this a plausible irony? Why? What does it tell us about the theme of the story? Why is it ironic that the whispers should be especially audible at Christmas time? What irony is contained in the boy’s last speech?

6. In what way is the boy’s furious riding on the rocking horse an appropriate symbol for materialistic pursuits?

7. How might a commercial writer have ended the story? 8. How many persons in the story are affected (or infected) by materialism? 9. What is the theme of the story? 10. Discuss the symbolism in this story. For example, is the rocking horse symbolic?

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

The Yellow Wallpaper 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.

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the yellow wallpaper First published in 1892. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is a major figure in the history of American feminism. During her busy career, she published such nonfiction works as Women and Economics (1898) and the Utopian novel, Herland (1915), which depicts a society composed entirely of women. Gilman suffered from a severe post-partum depression after the birth of her only child, and endured a “rest cure” that inspired “The Yellow Wallpaper,” her most famous work.

So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is—and tonics, and air and exercise, and journeys, 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 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.

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, 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 onto 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 he 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

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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 a nursery first, and then play- room 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, flam- boyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to 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 order 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 wallpaper!

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At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterward 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 wallpaper 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 as airy and comfortable a room as anyone 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 deep-shaded

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 storymaking, 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 ever- lastingness.

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

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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 wallpaper, 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 wallpaper has a kind of subpattern 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 all 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.

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Weir Mitchell: S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a prominent physician who invented the so-called rest cure for women suffering from psychological disturbances. Gilman was one of Mitchell’s patients.

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 worthwhile 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 wallpaper. Perhaps

because of the wallpaper. 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 sym- metry, 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 sea-weeds in full chase.

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonder- fully 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 grotesque seems to form around a common center and runs 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.

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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 mustn’t lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wines 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 wallpaper.

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 for it all the same.

There are things in the wallpaper that nobody knows about 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.

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John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper 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 thought 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 for 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 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 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 defi- ance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

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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 under way 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, bud- ding 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, candlelight, 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 subpattern, 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—oh, no! The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexpli-

cable 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

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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 pat- tern, 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 bet- ter, 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 wallpaper.

I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper—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 so much better! I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch develop-

ments; but I sleep a good deal during 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 wallpaper! 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 win- dows 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.

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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 in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in

those dark grape arbors, creeping all round the garden. 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!

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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 one 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 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 moon- light 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 today! We go away tomorrow, and they are moving all my furniture down

again to leave things as they were before.

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322 CHAPTER SIX / SYMBOL, ALLEGORY, AND FANTASY

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 tonight, and take the boat home tomorrow. 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 wallpaper 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!

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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 to Jennie 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!

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Why did the author choose first-person point of view for this story? In what ways is this point of view appropriate?

2. Is the narrator reliable or unreliable? Cite specific passages to support your answer. 3. Describe the characterization of the narrator’s husband, John. Is he a sympathetic

or unsympathetic character? 4. Most of the story is narrated in very brief paragraphs. Why is this the case and

why is it appropriate? 5. What does the yellow wallpaper symbolize? 6. What is the significance of the characters’ names? What do their names imply

about them? 7. Discuss the setting. How is the setting appropriate? 8. What is the story’s theme? What does it say about the position of women in

nineteenth-century America?

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GILMAN / THE YELLOW WALLPAPER 323

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324 CHAPTER SIX / SYMBOL, ALLEGORY, AND FANTASY

RAY BRADBURY

There Will Come Soft Rains In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, Seven o’clock, time to

get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sun- nyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceil- ing, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang qui- etly: “Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today . . .” And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.

Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.

At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.

Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean. Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were

acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

Ten o’clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing.

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there will come soft rains First published in 1950. Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was a highly prolific author of science fiction, mystery, and horror. He published hundreds of short stories in addition to such celebrated novels as Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).

At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted win- dowpanes running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball— remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light. Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully

it had inquired, “Who goes there? What’s the password?” and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, ser- vicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

Twelve noon. A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch. The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once

huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.

The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last real- izing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.

It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.

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326 CHAPTER SIX / SYMBOL, ALLEGORY, AND FANTASY

The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

Two o’clock, sang a voice. Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as

softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind. Two-fifteen. The dog was gone. In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks

leaped up the chimney. Two thirty-five. Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto

pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg- salad sandwiches. Music played.

But the tables were silent and the cards untouched. At four o’clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through

the paneled walls. Four-thirty. The nursery walls glowed. Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac

panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yel- low hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes.

It was the children’s hour.

Five o’clock. The bath filled with clear hot water. Six, seven, eight o’clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic

tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.

Nine o’clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.

Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling: “Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?”

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The house was silent. The voice said at last, “Since you express no preference, I shall select a

poem at random.” Quiet music rose to back the voice. “Sara Teasdale.° As I recall, your favorite. . . .

“There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire.

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.”

The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

At ten o’clock the house began to die. The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen

window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

“Fire!” screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: “Fire, fire, fire!”

The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the win- dows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.

The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scur- rying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.

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Sara Teasdale: Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was an American poet; the poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” appeared in her 1920 collection, Flame and Shadow.

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But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!

And then, reinforcements. From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet

mouths gushing green chemical. The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead

snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.

But the fire was clever. It had sent flame outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.

The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.

In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river. . . .

Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella franti- cally out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.

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The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke. In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, cir- cuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke. Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood

alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

“Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is . . .”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. This futuristic fantasy was published in 1950. Now we are much closer to the date of the story, 2026. How much of what Bradbury predicted in the story has come true? What elements of present-day culture turned out to exceed even Bradbury’s imagination?

2. The family who has occupied the house is notably absent. What has happened to them?

3. Bradbury employs short, lyrical paragraphs throughout the story. Why is this an effective means of narration?

4. Discuss the Sara Teasdale poem from which the story’s title is derived. What is the relationship between the poem and the story?

5. What does the story’s ending say about contemporary society? Why is the use of repetition effective here?

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. Compare the use of symbolism in any two of the following stories, clarifying how each achieves compression through the use of symbols:

a. Mansfield, “Miss Brill” (page 155). b. Joyce, “Araby” (page 186). c. Gordimer, “Once upon a Time” (page 234). d. Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (page 557). e. Hurston, “Sweat” (page 583). f. Ishiguro, “A Family Supper” (page 133).

2. Argue that any one of the following stories does, or does not, contain elements of fantasy. Carefully support your argument.

a. Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game” (page 62). b. Mansfield, “Miss Brill” (page 155). c. Porter, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (page 272). d. Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (page 392). e. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (page 297). f. Jackson, “The Lottery” (page 264). g. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (page 675).

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Humor and Irony

In previous chapters, we have sometimes used the term serious to describe a story or writer whose intentions are literary and artistic rather than primarily commercial. In this context, however, it’s important to understand that a serious story is not necessarily a solemn one. In fact, many of the world’s great works of serious literature have employed humor in conveying major truths about the human condition. The ancient Greek and Roman dramatists wrote raucous comic plays; Shakespeare’s humor is an important dimension of his work, in tragedies such as Hamlet and King Lear as well as in his famous comedies. Writers as diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Flannery O’Connor have used humor as a central element in their art.

Novels and short stories that employ humor often use the technique we call irony, a term which has a range of meanings that all involve some sort of discrepancy or incongruity. All the above-named writers are master ironists, employing incongruous situations and characters that evoke laughter in the reader even as they express a significant insight into human nature. Irony should not be equated with mere sarcasm, which is simply language one person uses to belittle or ridicule another. Irony is far more complex, a technique used to convey a truth about human experience by exposing some incongruity of a character’s behavior or a society’s traditions. Operating through careful, often subtle indirection, irony helps critique the world in which we live by laughing at the many varieties of human eccentricity and folly. It may be useful here to distinguish three distinct kinds of irony found in literary fiction.

Verbal irony, usually the simplest kind, is a figure of speech in which the speaker says the opposite of what he or she intends to say. (This form of irony is, in fact, often employed to create sarcasm.) In “Hunters in the Snow,” when Kenny says to Tub, “You’re just wasting away before my very eyes,” he is speaking ironically—and sarcastically—for of course Tub is obese, and Kenny intends to hurt him.

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In dramatic irony the contrast is between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true. The value of this kind of irony lies in the truth it conveys about the character or the character’s expectations. In “How I Met My Husband,” for instance, Loretta Bird says about Mrs. Peebles, “She wouldn’t find time to lay down in the middle of the day, if she had seven kids like I got.” The reader grasps the irony of this remark, since Loretta herself often “finds time” to sit gossiping at the Peebles farm instead of staying home with her children. Another effective example comes when Miss Brill, sitting in the park, thinks about the other people around her:

Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, and—Miss Brill had often noticed—there was something funny about nearly all of them . . . from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even—even cupboards!

It is ironic that the judgment she makes of them is exactly the same one the story makes of her—even including the word “funny,” which the young girl later uses about her beloved fur. Miss Brill is unaware that her phrase “nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday” describes her own behavior, which she unwittingly reveals when she thinks that she “had often noticed” them. And of course the irony of the statement about the “cupboards” they must have come from becomes overt when she returns at the end of the story to “her room like a cupboard.” Perhaps the most poignant of the dramatic ironies involving Miss Brill lies in her boastful thought, “Yes, I have been an actress for a long time,” for she has indeed created a fictitious role for her- self—not that of a glamorous stage actress in a romantic musical play, but that of a perceptive, happy, and self-sufficient woman. First-person stories similarly use dramatic irony to suggest that the narrator is not reliable. In Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” for example, Granny con- fusedly reports that ants are biting her when she is actually receiving a hypodermic injection, and that the priest is tickling her feet when really he is administering extreme unction (the last rites in Roman Catholicism). The result is an ironic portrayal of Granny’s bewildered mental state.

In irony of situation, usually the most important kind for the fiction writer, the discrepancy is between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between what is and what would seem appropriate. In “The Most Dangerous Game,” it is ironic that Rainsford, “the celebrated hunter,” should become the hunted, for this is a reversal of his expected and appropriate role. In “The Destructors,” it is ironic that Old Misery’s horoscope should read, “Abstain from any dealings in

first half of week. Danger of serious crash,” for the horoscope is valid in a sense that is quite different from what the words appear to indicate. In “Interpreter of Maladies” (page 653), it is ironic that Mr. Das’s guidebook to India “looked as if it had been published abroad,” and that the Indian tour guide Mr. Kapasi watches the American television show Dallas but the American-born Tina Das has never heard of the program. In “Hunters in the Snow,” it is ironic that inside the diner Frank and Tub encourage one another’s self-indulgent behavior—Frank’s lust for a teenage babysitter, Tub’s gluttony—and view themselves as forming a noble, trusting alliance, when all the while their companion Kenny is lying wounded and freezing outside in the back of their truck.

Irony, like symbol and allegory, is often a means for the author to achieve compression. By creating an ironic situation or perspective, the author can suggest complex meanings without stating them. In “Miss Brill,” we do not need to be told how difficult it is for an aging, solitary woman to cope with her aloneness; we witness her plight and the incongruous means by which she attempts to deny it and therefore endure it. In “Hunters in the Snow,” we do not need to be told that these three hunting buddies are not “friends” in any meaningful sense of that word; we witness their cruel, self-absorbed behavior. In these and other stories, the ironic contrast between appearances and reality generates a complex set of meanings.

One reason that irony is such an important technique is that a story, like other art forms, achieves its effects through indirection. “Tell all the truth,” Emily Dickinson advised, “but tell it slant”—advice as valid for fiction writers as for poets. In art, the truth must be produced indirectly because a flat statement—as in an essay, or a dry plot summary—can have no emotional impact on the reader. We must feel the truth a story conveys with our whole being, not simply understand it with our intellect. If a story has no emotional impact, it has failed as a work of art.

Humor and irony are important because they help an author achieve such an impact. A reader will not respond to a story, for instance, that contrives its emotions and attempts to “play upon” the reader’s feelings directly. An ironic method can help temper and control the emotional content of a story, evoking responses that are intellectual and emotional at once. At the end of “Interpreter of Maladies,” we feel Mr. Kapasi’s disillusionment even as we understand the hopelessness of his attraction to Mrs. Das. The narrator’s cool, dispassionate stance, complete with its ironic observations and its undercurrent of humor, helps keep the story’s emotional content more honest, genuine, and believable.

By contrast, stories that try to elicit easy or unearned emotional responses are guilty of sentimentality. Sentimentality in fiction is not the same as genuine emotion; rather, it is contrived or excessive emotion. A novel such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for

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instance, often tries to wring tears from the reader over the plight of African American slaves; for this reason, the novel is much less powerful as a work of art than Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which uses carefully restrained, artful language and a frequently biting irony in its castigation of slavery. A narrative contains genuine emotion when it treats life faithfully and perceptively. A sentimental narrative oversimplifies and exaggerates emo- tion in the attempt to arouse a similarly excessive emotion in the reader.

Genuine emotion, like character, is presented indirectly—it is dramatized. It cannot be produced by words that identify emotions, like angry, sad, pathetic, heart-breaking, or passionate. A writer draws forth genuine emotion by producing a character in a situation that deserves our sympathy and showing us enough about the character and the situation to make them real and convincing.

Sentimental writers are recognizable by a number of characteristics. First, they often try to make words do what the situation faithfully pre- sented by itself will not do. They editorialize—that is, comment on the story and, in a manner, instruct us how to feel. Or they overwrite and poeticize—use an immoderately heightened and distended language to accomplish their effects.

Second, they make an excessively selective use of detail. All artists, of course, must be selective in their use of detail, but good writers use representative details while sentimentalists use details that all point one way—toward producing emotion rather than conveying truth. The little child who dies will be shown as always uncomplaining and cheerful under adversity, never as naughty, querulous, or ungrateful. It will possibly be an orphan or the only child of a mother who loves the child dearly; in addi- tion, it may be lame, hungry, ragged, and possessed of one toy, from which it cannot be parted. The villain will be all villain, with a cruel laugh and a sharp whip, although he may reform at the end, for sentimentalists are firm believers in the heart of gold beneath the rough exterior. In short, reality will be unduly heightened and drastically oversimplified.

Third, sentimentalists rely heavily on the stock response—an emotion that has its source outside the facts established by the story. In some read- ers certain situations and objects—babies, mothers, grandmothers, young love, patriotism, worship—produce an almost automatic response, whether the immediate situation warrants it or not. Sentimental writers, to affect such readers, have only to draw out certain stops, as on an organ, to produce an easily anticipated effect. They depend on stock materials to produce a stock response. Thus, they need not go to the trouble of picturing the situ- ation in realistic and convincing detail.

Finally, sentimental writers present, nearly always, a fundamentally “sweet” picture of life. They rely not only on stock characters and situa- tions but also on stock themes. For them every cloud has its silver lining, every bad event its good side, every storm its rainbow—even the death of

a sweet little child will inspire someone to reform and lead a better life thereafter. Virtue is characteristically triumphant: the villain is defeated, the ne’er-do-well redeemed. True love is rewarded in some fashion; it is love—never hate—that makes the world go round. In short, sentimental writers specialize in the sad but sweet. The tears called for are warm tears, never bitter. There is always sugar at the bottom of the cup.

The writers we value most are able to look at human experience in a clear-eyed, honest way and to employ literary techniques such as humor and irony as a way to enhance, not reduce, the emotional impact of their stories. Although not every first-rate story contains humor, there are few that do not involve some blend on the author’s part of human empathy and ironic detachment. After reading “Hills Like White Elephants,” “Miss Brill,” and “A Rose for Emily,” for example, we experience a similarly blended response to the protagonists of these stories. A complex human reality requires a complex narrative technique, and in this way the best storytellers always have attempted to portray the whole of human experience—from its most tragic misery to its most absurd folly—in a single, integrated artistic vision.

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R S E V E N

1. Distinguish between verbal irony and dramatic irony. 2. Define the term “irony of situation.” 3. Explore the reasons why sentimentality is an undesirable trait in

literary fiction. 4. List the major characteristics of sentimental writing. 5. Describe the particular types of irony found in the following stories.

DANIEL OROZCO

Orientation Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle

there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your

ORIENTATION First published in 2011. Daniel Orozco (b. 1957) is the author of Orientation and Other Stories. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.

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supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.

These are your in- and out-boxes. All the forms in your in-box must be logged in by the date shown in the upper-left-hand corner, initialed by you in the upper-right-hand corner, and distributed to the Processing Analyst whose name is numerically coded in the lower-left-hand corner. The lower- right-hand corner is left blank. Here’s your Processing Analyst Numerical Code Index. And here’s your Forms Processing Procedures Manual.

You must pace your work. What do I mean? I’m glad you asked that. We pace our work according to the eight-hour workday. If you have twelve hours of work in your in-box, for example, you must compress that work into the eight-hour day. If you have one hour of work in your in-box, you must expand that work to fill the eight-hour day. That was a good ques- tion. Feel free to ask questions. Ask too many questions, however, and you may be let go.

That is our receptionist. She is a temp. We go through receptionists here. They quit with alarming frequency. Be polite and civil to the temps. Learn their names, and invite them to lunch occasionally. But don’t get close to them, as it only makes it more difficult when they leave. And they always leave. You can be sure of that.

The men’s room is over there. The women’s room is over there. John LaFountaine, who sits over there, uses the women’s room occasionally. He says it is accidental. We know better, but we let it pass. John LaFountaine is harmless, his forays into the forbidden territory of the women’s room simply a benign thrill, a faint blip on the dull, flat line of his life.

Russell Nash, who sits in the cubicle to your left, is in love with Amanda Pierce, who sits in the cubicle to your right. They ride the same bus together after work. For Amanda Pierce, it is just a tedious bus ride made less tedious by the idle nattering of Russell Nash. But for Russell Nash, it is the highlight of his day. It is the highlight of his life. Russell Nash has put on forty pounds and grows fatter with each passing month, nibbling on chips and cookies while peeking glumly over the partitions at Amanda Pierce and gorging himself at home on cold pizza and ice cream while watching adult videos on TV.

Amanda Pierce, in the cubicle to your right, has a six-year-old son named Jamie, who is autistic. Her cubicle is plastered from top to bot- tom with the boy’s crayon artwork—sheet after sheet of precisely drawn concentric circles and ellipses, in black and yellow. She rotates them every other Friday. Be sure to comment on them. Amanda Pierce also has a husband, who is a lawyer. He subjects her to an escalating array of painful and humiliating sex games, to which Amanda Pierce reluctantly submits. She comes to work exhausted and freshly wounded each morning, wincing

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from the abrasions on her breasts, or the bruises on her abdomen, or the second-degree burns on the backs of her thighs.

But we’re not supposed to know any of this. Do not let on. If you let on, you may be let go.

Amanda Pierce, who tolerates Russell Nash, is in love with Albert Bosch, whose office is over there. Albert Bosch, who only dimly registers Amanda Pierce’s existence, has eyes only for Ellie Tapper, who sits over there. Ellie Tapper, who hates Albert Bosch, would walk through fire for Curtis Lance. But Curtis Lance hates Ellie Tapper. Isn’t the world a funny place? Not in the ha-ha sense, of course.

Anika Bloom sits in that cubicle. Last year, while reviewing quar- terly reports in a meeting with Barry Hacker, Anika Bloom’s left palm began to bleed. She fell into a trance, stared into her hand, and told Barry Hacker when and how his wife would die. We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker’s wife is dead. So unless you want to know exactly when and how you’ll die, never talk to Anika Bloom.

Colin Heavey sits in that cubicle over there. He was new once, just like you. We warned him about Anika Bloom. But at last year’s Christmas Potluck he felt sorry for her when he saw that no one was talking to her. Colin Heavey brought her a drink. He hasn’t been himself since. Colin Heavey is doomed. There’s nothing he can do about it, and we are power- less to help him. Stay away from Colin Heavey. Never give any of your work to him. If he asks to do something, tell him you have to check with me. If he asks again, tell him I haven’t gotten back to you.

This is the fire exit. There are several on this floor, and they are marked accordingly. We have a Floor Evacuation Review every three months, and an Escape Route Quiz once a month. We have our Biannual Fire Drill twice a year, and our Annual Earthquake Drill once a year. These are precautions only. These things never happen.

For your information, we have a comprehensive health plan. Any catastrophic illness, any unforeseen tragedy, is completely covered. All dependents are completely covered. Larry Bagdikian, who sits over there, has six daughters. If anything were to happen to any of his girls, or to all of them, if all six were to simultaneously fall victim to illness or injury— stricken with a hideous degenerative muscle disease or some rare toxic blood disorder, sprayed with semiautomatic gunfire while on a class field trip, or attacked in their bunk beds by some prowling nocturnal lunatic—if any of this were to pass, Larry’s girls would all be taken care of. Larry Bagdikian would not have to pay one dime. He would have nothing to worry about.

We also have a generous vacation and sick leave policy. We have an excellent disability insurance plan. We have a stable and profitable pen- sion fund. We get group discounts for the symphony, and block seating at

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the ballpark. We get commuter ticket books for the bridge. We have direct deposit. We are all members of Costco.

This is our kitchenette. And this, this is our Mr. Coffee. We have a cof- fee pool into which we each pay two dollars a week for coffee, filters, sugar, and Coffee-mate. If you prefer Cremora or half-and-half to Coffee-mate, there is a special pool for three dollars a week. If you prefer Sweet’N Low to sugar, there is a special pool for two-fifty a week. We do not do decaf. You are allowed to join the coffee pool of your choice, but you are not allowed to touch the Mr. Coffee.

This is the microwave oven. You are allowed to heat food in the micro- wave oven. You are not, however, allowed to cook food in the microwave oven.

We get one hour for lunch. We also get one fifteen-minute break in the morning and one fifteen-minute break in the afternoon. Always take your breaks. If you skip a break, it is gone forever. For your information, your break is a privilege, not a right. If you abuse the break policy, we are autho- rized to rescind your breaks. Lunch, however, is a right, not a privilege. If you abuse the lunch policy, our hands will be tied and we will be forced to look the other way. We will not enjoy that.

This is the refrigerator. You may put your lunch in it. Barry Hacker, who sits over there, steals food from this refrigerator. His petty theft is an outlet for his grief. Last New Year’s Eve, while kissing his wife, a blood vessel burst in her brain. Barry Hacker’s wife was two months pregnant at the time and lingered in a coma for half a year before she died. It was a tragic loss for Barry Hacker. He hasn’t been himself since. Barry Hacker’s wife was a beautiful woman. She was also completely covered. Barry Hacker did not have to pay one dime. But his dead wife haunts him. She haunts all of us. We have seen her, reflected in the monitors of our comput- ers, moving past our cubicles. We have seen the dim shadow of her face in our photocopies. She pencils herself in in the receptionist’s appointment book with the notation “To see Barry Hacker.” She has left messages in the receptionist’s Voicemail box, messages garbled by the electronic chirrups and buzzes in the phone line, her voice echoing from an immense distance within the ambient hum. But the voice is hers. And beneath the voice, beneath the tidal whoosh of static and hiss, the gurgling and crying of a baby can be heard.

In any case, if you bring a lunch, put a little something extra in the bag for Barry Hacker. We have four Barrys in this office. Isn’t that a coin- cidence?

This is Matthew Payne’s office. He is our Unit Manager, and his door is always closed. We have never seen him, and you will never see him. But he is there. You can be sure of that. He is all around us.

This is the Custodian’s Closet. You have no business in the Custodian’s Closet.

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And this, this is our Supplies Cabinet. If you need supplies, see Curtis Lance. He will log you in on the Supplies Cabinet Authorization Log, then give you a Supplies Authorization Slip. Present your pink copy of the Sup- plies Authorization Slip to Ellie Tapper. She will log you in on the Supplies Cabinet Key Log, then give you the key. Because the Supplies Cabinet is located outside the Unit Manager’s office, you must be very quiet. Gather your supplies quietly. The Supplies Cabinet is divided into four sections. Section One contains letterhead stationery, blank paper and envelopes, memo pads and notepads, and so on. Section Two contains pens and pencils and typewriter and printer ribbons, and the like. In Section Three we have erasers, correction fluids, transparent tapes, glue sticks, et cetera. And in Section Four we have paper clips and pushpins and scissors and razor blades. And here are the spare blades for the shredder. Do not touch the shredder, which is located over there. The shredder is of no concern to you.

Gwendolyn Stich sits in that office there. She is crazy about penguins and collects penguin knickknacks: penguin posters and coffee mugs and stationery, penguin stuffed animals, penguin jewelry, penguin sweaters and T-shirts and socks. She has a pair of penguin fuzzy slippers she wears when working late at the office. She has a tape cassette of penguin sounds, which she listens to for relaxation. Her favorite colors are black and white. She has personalized license plates that read PEN GWEN. Every morning, she passes through all the cubicles to wish each of us a good morning. She brings Danish on Wednesdays for Hump Day morning break, and doughnuts on Fridays for TGIF afternoon break. She organizes the Annual Christmas Potluck and is in charge of the Birthday List. Gwendolyn Stich’s door is always open to all of us. She will always lend an ear and put in a good word for you; she will always give you a hand, or the shirt off her back, or a shoul- der to cry on. Because her door is always open, she hides and cries in a stall in the women’s room. And John LaFountaine—who, enthralled when a woman enters, sits quietly in his stall with his knees to his chest—John LaFountaine has heard her vomiting in there. We have come upon Gwendolyn Stich huddled in the stairwell, shivering in the updraft, sipping a Diet Mr. Pibb and hugging her knees. She does not let any of this interfere with her work. If it interfered with her work, she might have to be let go.

Kevin Howard sits in that cubicle over there. He is a serial killer, the one they call the Carpet Cutter, responsible for the mutilations across town. We’re not supposed to know that, so do not let on. Don’t worry. His compulsion inflicts itself on strangers only, and the routine established is elaborate and unwavering. The victim must be a white male, a young adult no older than thirty, heavyset, with dark hair and eyes, and the like. The victim must be chosen at random before sunset, from a public place; the victim is followed home and must put up a struggle; et cetera. The carnage inflicted is precise: the angle and direction of the incisions, the layering of

skin and muscle tissue, the rearrangement of visceral organs, and so on. Kevin Howard does not let any of this interfere with his work. He is, in fact, our fastest typist. He types as if he were on fire. He has a secret crush on Gwendolyn Stich and leaves a red-foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss on her desk every afternoon. But he hates Anika Bloom and keeps well away from her. In his presence, she has uncontrollable fits of shaking and trembling. Her left palm does not stop bleeding.

In any case, when Kevin Howard gets caught, act surprised. Say that he seemed like a nice person, a bit of a loner, perhaps, but always quiet and polite.

This is the photocopier room. And this, this is our view. It faces southwest. West is down there, toward the water. North is back there. Because we are on the seventeenth floor, we are afforded a magnificent view. Isn’t it beautiful? It overlooks the park, where the tops of those trees are. You can see a segment of the bay between those two buildings over there. You can see the sun set in the gap between those two buildings over there. You can see this building reflected in the glass panels of that building across the way. There. See? That’s you, waving. And look there. There’s Anika Bloom in the kitchenette, waving back.

Enjoy this view while photocopying. If you have problems with the photocopier, see Russell Nash. If you have any questions, ask your supervisor. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers. He sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks. She sits over there. If you can’t find them, feel free to ask me. That’s my cubicle. I sit in there.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. What is the source of the humor in “Orientation”? Point to specific passages. 2. Who is the narrator? How would you describe the narrator’s tone? 3. To whom is the narrator speaking? 4. How does Orozco characterize the office workers?

MARK TWAIN

Cannibalism in the Cars I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars

at Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way stations and sat down

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cannibalism in the cars First published in 1868. “Mark Twain,” the pen name of Samuel L. Clemens, was perhaps the most celebrated American writer of the nineteenth century, the author of such classics as Innocents Abroad (1868) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In much of his work, including “Cannibalism in the Cars,” Twain’s sense of humor is clearly com- bined with a cynical outlook on the human race.

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beside me. We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining. When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask ques- tions about various public men, and about congressional affairs; and I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the capital, even to the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of senators and representatives in the chambers of the national legislature. Presently two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other: “Harris, if you’ll do that for me, I’ll never forget you, my boy.”

My new comrade’s eye lighted pleasantly. The words had touched upon a happy memory, I thought. Then his face settled into thoughtfulness— almost into gloom. He turned to me and said, “Let me tell you a story, let me give you a secret chapter of my life—a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events transpired. Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt me.”

I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure, speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always with feeling and earnestness.

“On the nineteenth of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening train bound for Chicago. There were only twenty-four passengers, all told. There were no ladies and no children. We were in excellent spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed. The journey bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had even the vagu- est presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo.

“At 11:00 p.m. it began to snow hard. Shortly after leaving the small village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward the Jubilee Settlements. The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy sea. The snow was deepening fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed of the train, that the engine was plowing through it with steadily increasing difficulty. Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes, in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves across the track. Conversation began to flag. Cheerfulness gave place to grave concern. The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every mind, and extended its depressing influence over every spirit.

“At two o’clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by the ceasing of all motion about me. The appalling truth flashed upon me instantly—we were captives in a snowdrift! “All hands to the rescue!”

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Every man sprang to obey. Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness, the billow snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all. Shovels, hands, boards—anything, everything that could displace snow, was brought into instant requisition. It was a weird picture, that small company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive’s reflector.

“One short hour sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts. The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away. And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the driving wheel! With a free track before us we should still have been helpless. We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful. We gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation. We had no provisions whatever—in this lay our chief distress. We could not freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender. This was our only comfort. The discussion ended at last in accepting the disheartening decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that. We could not send for help, and even if we could it would not come. We must submit, and await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation! I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words were uttered.

“Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled them- selves among the flickering shadows to think—to forget the present, if they could—to sleep, if they might.

“The eternal night—it surely seemed eternal to us—wore its lagging hours away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east. As the light grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs and glanced out of the windows upon the cheerless prospect. It was cheerless, indeed!—not a living thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the wind—a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.

“All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much. Another lingering dreary night—and hunger.

“Another dawning—another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger, hopeless watching for succor that could not come. A night of restless slum- ber, filled with dreams of feasting—wakings distressed with the gnawings of hunger.

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“The fourth day came and went—and the fifth! Five days of dreadful imprisonment! A savage hunger looked out at every eye. There was in it a sign of awful import—the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely shaping itself in every heart—a something which no tongue dared yet to frame into words.

“The sixth day passed—the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and hag- gard and hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death. It must out now! That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready to leap from every lip at last! Nature had been taxed to the utmost— she must yield. Richard H. Gaston of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, and pale, rose up. All knew what was coming. All prepared—every emotion, every semblance of excitement was smothered—only a calm, thoughtful serious- ness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild.

“‘Gentlemen: It cannot be delayed longer! The time is at hand! We must determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!’

“MR. JOHN J. WILLIAMS of Illinois rose and said: ‘Gentlemen— I nominate the Reverend James Sawyer of Tennessee.’

“MR. WM. R. ADAMS of Indiana said: ‘I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote of New York.’

“MR. CHARLES J. LANGDON: ‘I nominate Mr. Samuel A. Bowen of St. Louis.’

“MR. SLOTE: ‘Gentlemen—I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van Nostrand, Jr., of New Jersey.’

“MR. GASTON: ‘If there be no objection, the gentleman’s desire will be acceded to.’

“Mr. Van Nostrand objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected. The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and refused upon the same grounds.

“MR. A. L. BASCOM of Ohio: ‘I move that the nominations now close, and that the House proceed to an election by ballot.’

“MR. SAWYER: ‘Gentlemen—I protest earnestly against these proceedings. They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming. I must beg to move that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the business before us understandingly.’

“MR. BELL of Iowa: ‘Gentlemen—I object. This is no time to stand upon forms and ceremonious observances. For more than seven days we have been without food. Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our distress. I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made— every gentleman present is, I believe—and I, for one, do not see why we should not proceed at once to elect one or more of them. I wish to offer a resolution—’

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“MR. GASTON: ‘It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid. The gentleman from New Jersey—’

“MR. VAN NOSTRAND: ‘Gentlemen—I am a stranger among you; I have not sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a delicacy—’

“MR. MORGAN of Alabama (interrupting): ‘I move the previous question.’

“The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course. The motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen chairman, Mr. Blake, secretary, Messrs. Holcomb, Dyer and Baldwin a committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the committee in making selections.

“A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing followed. At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the com- mittee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson of Kentucky, Lucien Herrman of Louisiana and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates. The report was accepted.

“MR. ROGERS of Missouri: ‘Mr. President—The report being prop- erly before the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr. Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St. Louis, who is well and honorably known to us all. I do not wish to be understood as casting the least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman from Louisiana—far from it. I respect and esteem him as much as any gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the fact that he had lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here than any among us—none of us can be blind to the fact that the committee has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a graver fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him—’

“THE CHAIR: ‘The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat. The Chair cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the regular course, under the rules. What action will the House take upon the gentleman’s motion?’

“MR. HALLIDAY of Virginia: ‘I move to further amend the report by substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick. It may be urged by gentlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have rendered Mr. Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at tough- ness? Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles? Is this a time to dispute about matters of paltry significance? No, gentlemen, bulk is what we desired—substance, weight, bulk—these are the supreme requisites now—not talent, not genius, not education. I insist upon my motion.’

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“MR. MORGAN (excitedly): ‘Mr. Chairman—I do most strenuously object to this amendment. The gentleman from Oregon is old, and further- more is bulky only in bone—not in flesh. I ask the gentleman from Virginia if it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us with shadows? if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter? I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us? I ask him if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from Oregon’s inhospitable shores? Never!’ [Applause.]

“The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost. Mr. Harris was substituted on the first amendment. The balloting then began. Five ballots were held without a choice. On the sixth, Mr. Harris was elected, all voting for him but himself. It was then moved that his election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in consequence of his again voting against himself.

“Mr. Radway moved that the House now take up the remaining can- didates, and go into an election for breakfast. This was carried.

“On the first ballot there was a tie, half the members favoring one candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account of his superior size. The president gave the casting vote for the latter, Mr. Messick. This decision created considerable dissatisfaction among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was some talk of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it a motion to adjourn was carried, and the meeting broke up at once.

“The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then, when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr. Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds.

“We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car seats, and sat down with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our vision for seven torturing days. How changed we were from what we had been a few short hours before! Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger, feverish anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep for utterance now. That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful life. The winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house, but they were powerless to distress us anymore. I liked Harris. He might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree of satisfaction. Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored, but for

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genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber, give me Harris. Messick had his good points—I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish to do it— but he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be, sir— not a bit. Lean?—why, bless me!—and tough? Ah, he was very tough! You could not imagine it—you could never imagine anything like it.”

“Do you mean to tell me that—” “Do not interrupt me, please. After breakfast we elected a man by the

name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper. He was very good. I wrote his wife so afterward. He was worthy of all praise. I shall always remember Walker. He was a little rare, but very good. And then the next morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to—handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages fluently—a perfect gentleman—he was a perfect gentleman, and singu- larly juicy. For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud, there is no question about it—old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture the reality. I finally said, ‘Gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I will wait for another election.’ And Grimes of Illinois said, ‘Gentlemen, I will wait also. When you elect a man that has something to recommend him, I shall be glad to join you again.’ It soon became evident that there was general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so, to preserve the good will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker of Georgia was chosen. He was splendid! Well, well—after that we had Doolittle, and Hawkins, and McElroy (there was some complaint about McElroy, because he was uncommonly short and thin), and Penrod, and two Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he was otherwise good), and an Indian boy, and an organ-grinder and a gentleman by the name of Buckminster—a poor stick of a vagabond that wasn’t any good for company and no account for breakfast. We were glad we got him elected before relief came.”

“And so the blessed relief did come at last?” “Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election.

John  Murphy was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to testify; but John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to succor us, and lived to marry the widow Harris—”

“Relict of—” “Relict of our first choice. He married her, and is happy and respected

and prosperous yet. Ah, it was like a novel, sir—it was like a romance. This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you goodbye. Any time that you can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to have you. I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you. I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir. Good day, sir, and a pleasant journey.”

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He was gone. I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my life. But in my soul I was glad he was gone. With all his gentleness of manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly stood still!

I was bewildered beyond description. I did not doubt his word; I could not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnest- ness of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my thoughts into hopeless confusion. I saw the conductor looking at me. I said, “Who is that man?”

“He was a member of congress once, and a good one. But he got caught in a snowdrift in the cars, and like to have been starved to death. He got so frostbitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three months afterward. He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole carload of people he talks about. He would have finished the crowd by this time, only he had to get out here. He has got their names as pat as ABC. When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says: ‘Then the hour for the unusual election for breakfast having arrived, and there being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no objections offered, I resigned. Thus I am here.’”

I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. This story is notable for its use of a “frame device”: in this case, an outside narrator—he gives the stage, so to speak, to a character who was actually pres- ent when the train wrecked—who then reappears at the end. Why is this device effective? What would be lost if this outside narrator were removed from the story altogether?

2. How would you describe the tone of the story? Is it comic or is it serious, or is it a blend of both? What is the source of the story’s humor?

3. How does this story differ from other Mark Twain works you have read? Does it take a different approach from that found in his more typical work?

4. Discuss the ending. Is the story more or less effective for being revealed as a madman’s deranged fantasy? If the story were presented as factual realism, would it still be believable?

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Read, highlight, and take notes online.

ALBERT CAMUS

The Guest The schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. One

was on horseback, the other on foot. They had not yet tackled the abrupt rise leading to the schoolhouse built on the hillside. They were toiling onward, making slow progress in the snow, among the stones, on the vast expanse of the high, deserted plateau. From time to time the horse stumbled. With- out hearing anything yet, he could see the breath issuing from the horse’s nostrils. One of the men, at least, knew the region. They were following the trail although it had disappeared days ago under a layer of dirty white snow. The schoolmaster calculated that it would take them half an hour to get onto the hill. It was cold; he went back into the school to get a sweater.

He crossed the empty, frigid classroom. On the blackboard the four rivers of France, drawn with four different colored chalks, had been flowing toward their estuaries for the past three days. Snow had suddenly fallen in mid-October after eight months of drought without the transition of rain, and the twenty pupils, more or less, who lived in the villages scattered over the plateau had stopped coming. With fair weather they would return. Daru now heated only the single room that was his lodging, adjoining the classroom and giving also onto the plateau to the east. Like the class windows, his window looked to the south too. On that side the school was a few kilometers from the point where the plateau began to slope toward the south. In clear weather could be seen the purple mass of the mountain range where the gap opened onto the desert.

Somewhat warmed, Daru returned to the window from which he had first seen the two men. They were no longer visible. Hence they must have tackled the rise. The sky was not so dark, for the snow had stopped fall- ing during the night. The morning had opened with a dirty light which had scarcely become brighter as the ceiling of clouds lifted. At two in the afternoon it seemed as if the day were merely beginning. But still this was better than those three days when the thick snow was falling amidst

The Guest First published in 1957. Translated into English by Justin O’Brien. Algeria, now a republic, was until midcentury a French territory with a population of about 88 percent Muslim (either Arab or Berber). Daru and Balducci, in the story, are French civil servants. Algeria gained its independence as a result of the Algerian War, 1954–1962, a Muslim revolt against French rule. Albert Camus (1913–1960), although a Frenchman, was born in northeastern Algeria, was educated in Algiers, and did not see France until 1939. In 1940, with the fall of France to Ger- many, he returned to Algiers and taught for two years in a private school in Oran, on the seacoast. In 1942 he returned to Paris and engaged actively in the Resistance movement by writing for the underground press. He continued his residence in Paris after World War II.

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unbroken darkness with little gusts of wind that rattled the double door of the classroom. Then Daru had spent long hours in his room, leaving it only to go to the shed and feed the chickens or get some coal. Fortunately the delivery truck from Tadjid, the nearest village to the north, had brought his supplies two days before the blizzard. It would return in forty-eight hours.

Besides, he had enough to resist a siege, for the little room was clut- tered with bags of wheat that the administration left as a stock to distrib- ute to those of his pupils whose families had suffered from the drought. Actually they had all been victims because they were all poor. Every day Daru would distribute a ration to the children. They had missed it, he knew, during these bad days. Possibly one of the fathers or big brothers would come this afternoon and he could supply them with grain. It was just a matter of carrying them over to the next harvest. Now shiploads of wheat were arriving from France and the worst was over. But it would be hard to forget that poverty, that army of ragged ghosts wandering in the sunlight, the plateaus burned to a cinder month after month, the earth shriveled up little by little, literally scorched, every stone bursting into dust under one’s foot. The sheep had died then by thousands and even a few men, here and there, sometimes without anyone’s knowing.

In contrast with such poverty, he who lived almost like a monk in his remote schoolhouse, nonetheless satisfied with the little he had and with the rough life, had felt like a lord with his whitewashed walls, his narrow couch, his unpainted shelves, his well, and his weekly provision of water and food. And suddenly this snow, without warning, without the foretaste of rain. This is the way the region was, cruel to live in, even without men— who didn’t help matters either. But Daru had been born here. Everywhere else, he felt exiled.

He stepped out onto the terrace in front of the schoolhouse. The two men were now halfway up the slope. He recognized the horseman as Balducci, the old gendarme he had known for a long time. Balducci was holding on the end of a rope an Arab who was walking behind him with hands bound and head lowered. The gendarme waved a greeting to which Daru did not reply, lost as he was in contemplation of the Arab dressed in a faded blue jellaba,° his feet in sandals but covered with socks of heavy raw wool, his head surmounted by a narrow, short chèche.° They were approach- ing. Balducci was holding back his horse in order not to hurt the Arab, and the group was advancing slowly.

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jellaba: long, full-sleeved robe worn in North Africa chèche: long piece of material that can be wrapped around the neck, face, and/or head for protection from desert sun and sand

Within earshot, Balducci shouted: “One hour to do the three kilo- meters from El Ameur!” Daru did not answer. Short and square in his thick sweater, he watched them climb. Not once had the Arab raised his head. “Hello,” said Daru when they got up onto the terrace. “Come in and warm up.” Balducci painfully got down from his horse without letting go the rope. From under his bristling mustache he smiled at the schoolmas- ter. His little dark eyes, deep-set under a tanned forehead, and his mouth surrounded with wrinkles made him look attentive and studious. Daru took the bridle, led the horse to the shed, and came back to the two men, who were now waiting for him in the school. He led them into his room. “I am going to heat up the classroom,” he said. “We’ll be more comfort- able there.” When he entered the room again, Balducci was on the couch. He had undone the rope tying him to the Arab, who had squatted near the stove. His hands still bound, the chèche pushed back on his head, he was looking toward the window. At first Daru noticed only his huge lips, fat, smooth, almost Negroid; yet his nose was straight, his eyes were dark and full of fever. The chèche revealed an obstinate forehead and, under the weathered skin now rather discolored by the cold, the whole face had a restless and rebellious look that struck Daru when the Arab, turning his face toward him, looked him straight in the eyes. “Go into the other room,” said the schoolmaster, “and I’ll make you some mint tea.” “Thanks,” Balducci said. “What a chore! How I long for retirement.” And addressing his prisoner in Arabic: “Come on, you.” The Arab got up and, slowly, hold- ing his bound wrists in front of him, went into the classroom.

With the tea, Daru brought a chair. But Balducci was already enthroned on the nearest pupil’s desk and the Arab had squatted against the teacher’s platform facing the stove, which stood between the desk and the window. When he held out the glass of tea to the prisoner, Daru hesitated at the sight of his bound hands. “He might perhaps be untied.” “Sure,” said Balducci. “That was for the trip.” He started to get to his feet. But Daru, setting the glass on the floor, had knelt beside the Arab. With- out saying anything, the Arab watched him with his feverish eyes. Once his hands were free, he rubbed his swollen wrists against each other, took the glass of tea, and sucked up the burning liquid in swift little sips.

“Good,” said Daru. “And where are you headed?” Balducci withdrew his mustache from the tea. “Here, son.” “Odd pupils! And you’re spending the night?” “No. I’m going back to El Ameur. And you will deliver this fellow to

Tinguit. He is expected at police headquarters.” Balducci was looking at Daru with a friendly little smile. “What’s this story?” asked the schoolmaster. “Are you pulling my leg?” “No, son. Those are the orders.”

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The orders? I’m not . . .” Daru hesitated, not wanting to hurt the old Corsican. “I mean, that’s not my job.”

“What! What’s the meaning of that? In wartime people do all kinds of jobs.”

“Then I’ll wait for the declaration of war!” Balducci nodded. “O.K. But the orders exist and they concern you too. Things are brewing,

it appears. There is talk of a forthcoming revolt. We are mobilized, in a way.” Daru still had his obstinate look. “Listen, son,” Balducci said. “I like you and you must understand.

There’s only a dozen of us at El Ameur to patrol throughout the whole ter- ritory of a small department and I must get back in a hurry. I was told to hand this guy over to you and return without delay. He couldn’t be kept there. His village was beginning to stir; they wanted to take him back. You must take him to Tinguit tomorrow before the day is over. Twenty kilo- meters shouldn’t faze a husky fellow like you. After that, all will be over. You’ll come back to your pupils and your comfortable life.”

Behind the wall the horse could be heard snorting and pawing the earth. Daru was looking out the window. Decidedly, the weather was clear- ing and the light was increasing over the snowy plateau. When all the snow was melted, the sun would take over again and once more would burn the fields of stone. For days, still, the unchanging sky would shed its dry light on the solitary expanse where nothing had any connection with man.

“After all,” he said, turning around toward Balducci, “what did he do?” And, before the gendarme had opened his mouth, he asked: “Does he speak French?”

“No, not a word. We had been looking for him for a month, but they were hiding him. He killed his cousin.”

“Is he against us?” “I don’t think so. But you can never be sure.” “Why did he kill?” “A family squabble, I think. One owed the other grain, it seems. It’s

not at all clear. In short, he killed his cousin with a billhook. You know, like a sheep, kreezk!”

Balducci made the gesture of drawing a blade across his throat and the Arab, his attention attracted, watched him with a sort of anxiety. Daru felt a sudden wrath against the man, against all men with their rotten spite, their tireless hates, their blood lust.

But the kettle was singing on the stove. He served Balducci more tea, hesitated, then served the Arab again, who, a second time, drank avidly. His raised arms made the jellaba fall open and the schoolmaster saw his thin, muscular chest.

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“Thanks, kid,” Balducci said. “And now, I’m off.” He got up and went toward the Arab, taking a small rope from his

pocket. “What are you doing?” Daru asked dryly. Balducci, disconcerted, showed him the rope. “Don’t bother.” The old gendarme hesitated. “It’s up to you. Of course, you are armed?” “I have my shotgun.” “Where?” “In the trunk.” “You ought to have it near your bed.” “Why? I have nothing to fear.” “You’re crazy, son. If there’s an uprising, no one is safe, we’re all in the

same boat.” “I’ll defend myself. I’ll have time to see them coming.” Balducci began to laugh, then suddenly the mustache covered the

white teeth. “You’ll have time? O.K. That’s just what I was saying. You have

always been a little cracked. That’s why I like you, my son was like that.” At the same time he took out his revolver and put it on the desk. “Keep it; I don’t need two weapons from here to El Ameur.” The revolver shone against the black paint of the table. When the

gendarme turned toward him, the schoolmaster caught the smell of leather and horseflesh.

“Listen, Balducci,” Daru said suddenly, “every bit of this disgusts me, and first of all your fellow here. But I won’t hand him over. Fight, yes, if I have to. But not that.”

The old gendarme stood in front of him and looked at him severely. “You’re being a fool,” he said slowly. “I don’t like it either. You don’t

get used to putting a rope on a man even after years of it, and you’re even ashamed—yes, ashamed. But you can’t let them have their way.”

“I won’t hand him over,” Daru said again. “It’s an order, son, and I repeat it.” “That’s right. Repeat to them what I’ve said to you: I won’t hand him over.” Balducci made a visible effort to reflect. He looked at the Arab and at

Daru. At last he decided. “No, I won’t tell them anything. If you want to drop us, go ahead; I’ll

not denounce you. I have an order to deliver the prisoner and I’m doing so. And now you’ll just sign this paper for me.”

“There’s no need. I’ll not deny that you left him with me.” “Don’t be mean with me. I know you’ll tell the truth. You’re from

hereabouts and you are a man. But you must sign, that’s the rule.”

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Daru opened his drawer, took out a little square bottle of purple ink, the red wooden penholder with the “sergeant-major” pen he used for mak- ing models of penmanship, and signed. The gendarme carefully folded the paper and put it into his wallet. Then he moved toward the door.

“I’ll see you off,” Daru said. “No,” said Balducci. “There’s no use being polite. You insulted me.” He looked at the Arab, motionless in the same spot, sniffed peevishly,

and turned away toward the door. “Good-by, son,” he said. The door shut behind him. Balducci appeared suddenly outside the window and then disappeared. His footsteps were muffled by the snow. The horse stirred on the other side of the wall and several chickens fluttered in fright. A moment later Balducci reappeared outside the window leading the horse by the bridle. He walked toward the little rise without turn- ing around and disappeared from sight with the horse following him. A big stone could be heard bouncing down. Daru walked back toward the prisoner, who, without stirring, never took his eyes off him. “Wait,” the schoolmaster said in Arabic and went toward the bedroom. As he was going through the door, he had a second thought, went to the desk, took the revolver, and stuck it in his pocket. Then, without looking back, he went into his room.

For some time he lay on his couch watching the sky gradually close over, listening to the silence. It was this silence that had seemed painful to him during the first days here, after the war. He had requested a post in the little town at the base of the foothills separating the upper plateaus from the desert. There, rocky walls, green and black to the north, pink and lavender to the south, marked the frontier of eternal summer. He had been named to a post farther north, on the plateau itself. In the beginning, the solitude and the silence had been hard for him on these wastelands peopled only by stones. Occasionally, furrows suggested cultivation, but they had been dug to uncover a certain kind of stone good for building. The only plowing here was to harvest rocks. Elsewhere a thin layer of soil accumulated in the hollows would be scraped out to enrich paltry village gardens. This is the way it was: bare rock covered three quarters of the region. Towns sprang up, flourished, then disappeared; men came by, loved one another or fought bitterly, then died. No one in this desert, neither he nor his guest, mattered. And yet, outside this desert neither of them, Daru knew, could have really lived.

When he got up, no noise came from the classroom. He was amazed at the unmixed joy he derived from the mere thought that the Arab might have fled and that he would be alone with no decision to make. But the prisoner was there. He had merely stretched out between the stove and the desk. With eyes open, he was staring at the ceiling. In that position, his thick lips were particularly noticeable, giving him a pouting look.

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“Come,” said Daru. The Arab got up and followed him. In the bedroom, the schoolmaster pointed to a chair near the table under the window. The Arab sat down without taking his eyes off Daru.

“Are you hungry?” “Yes,” the prisoner said. Daru set the table for two. He took flour and oil, shaped a cake in

a frying-pan, and lighted the little stove that functioned on bottled gas. While the cake was cooking, he went out to the shed to get cheese, eggs, dates, and condensed milk. When the cake was done he set it on the window sill to cool, heated some condensed milk diluted with water, and beat up the eggs into an omelette. In one of his motions he knocked against the revolver stuck in his right pocket. He set the bowl down, went into the classroom, and put the revolver in his desk drawer. When he came back to the room, night was falling. He put on the light and served the Arab. “Eat,” he said. The Arab took a piece of the cake, lifted it eagerly to his mouth, and stopped short.

“And you?” he asked. “After you. I’ll eat too.” The thick lips opened slightly. The Arab hesitated, then bit into the

cake determinedly. The meal over, the Arab looked at the schoolmaster. “Are you the

judge?” “No, I’m simply keeping you until tomorrow.” “Why do you eat with me?” “I’m hungry.” The Arab fell silent. Daru got up and went out. He brought back

a folding bed from the shed, set it up between the table and the stove, perpendicular to his own bed. From a large suitcase which, upright in a corner, served as a shelf for papers, he took two blankets and arranged them on the camp bed. Then he stopped, felt useless, and sat down on his bed. There was nothing more to do or to get ready. He had to look at this man. He looked at him, therefore, trying to imagine his face bursting with rage. He couldn’t do so. He could see nothing but the dark yet shining eyes and the animal mouth.

“Why did you kill him?” he asked in a voice whose hostile tone surprised him.

The Arab looked away. “He ran away. I ran after him.” He raised his eyes to Daru again and they were full of a sort of woeful

interrogation. “Now what will they do to me?” “Are you afraid?” He stiffened, turning his eyes away. “Are you sorry?”

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The Arab stared at him openmouthed. Obviously he did not under- stand. Daru’s annoyance was growing. At the same time he felt awkward and self-conscious with his big body wedged between the two beds.

“Lie down there,” he said impatiently. “That’s your bed.” The Arab didn’t move. He called to Daru: “Tell me!” The schoolmaster looked at him. “Is the gendarme coming back tomorrow?” “I don’t know.” “Are you coming with us?” “I don’t know. Why?” The prisoner got up and stretched out on top of the blankets, his feet

toward the window. The light from the electric bulb shone straight into his eyes and he closed them at once.

“Why?” Daru repeated, standing beside the bed. The Arab opened his eyes under the blinding light and looked at him,

trying not to blink. “Come with us,” he said.

In the middle of the night, Daru was still not asleep. He had gone to bed after undressing completely; he generally slept naked. But when he suddenly realized that he had nothing on, he hesitated. He felt vulner- able and the temptation came to him to put his clothes back on. Then he shrugged his shoulders; after all, he wasn’t a child and, if need be, he could break his adversary in two. From his bed he could observe him, lying on his back, still motionless with his eyes closed under the harsh light. When Daru turned out the light, the darkness seemed to coagulate all of a sudden. Little by little, the night came back to life in the window where the starless sky was stirring gently. The schoolmaster soon made out the body lying at his feet. The Arab still did not move, but his eyes seemed open. A faint wind was prowling around the schoolhouse. Perhaps it would drive away the clouds and the sun would reappear.

During the night the wind increased. The hens fluttered a little and then were silent. The Arab turned over on his side with his back to Daru, who thought he heard him moan. Then he listened for his guest’s breathing, become heavier and more regular. He listened to that breath so close to him and mused without being able to go to sleep. In this room where he had been sleeping alone for a year, this presence bothered him. But it bothered him also by imposing on him a sort of brotherhood he knew well but refused to accept in the present circumstances. Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop a strange alliance as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized every evening, over and above their differences, in the ancient community of

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dream and fatigue. But Daru shook himself; he didn’t like such musings, and it was essential to sleep.

A little later, however, when the Arab stirred slightly, the school- master was still not asleep. When the prisoner made a second move, he stiffened, on the alert. The Arab was lifting himself slowly on his arms with almost the motion of a sleepwalker. Seated upright in bed, he waited motionless without turning his head toward Daru, as if he were listening attentively. Daru did not stir; it had just occurred to him that the revolver was still in the drawer of his desk. It was better to act at once. Yet he continued to observe the prisoner, who, with the same slithery motion, put his feet on the ground, waited again, then began to stand up slowly. Daru was about to call out to him when the Arab began to walk, in a quite natural but extraordinarily silent way. He was heading toward the door at the end of the room that opened into the shed. He lifted the latch with precaution and went out, pushing the door behind him but without shut- ting it. Daru had not stirred. “He is running away,” he merely thought. “Good riddance!” Yet he listened attentively. The hens were not fluttering; the guest must be on the plateau. A faint sound of water reached him, and he didn’t know what it was until the Arab again stood framed in the doorway, closed the door carefully, and came back to bed without a sound. Then Daru turned his back on him and fell asleep. Still later he seemed, from the depths of his sleep, to hear furtive steps around the schoolhouse. “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” he repeated to himself. And he went on sleeping.

When he awoke, the sky was clear; the loose window let in a cold, pure air. The Arab was asleep, hunched up under the blankets now, his mouth open, utterly relaxed. But when Daru shook him, he started dread- fully, staring at Daru with wild eyes as if he had never seen him and such a frightened expression that the schoolmaster stepped back. “Don’t be afraid. It’s me. You must eat.” The Arab nodded his head and said yes. Calm had returned to his face, but his expression was vacant and listless.

The coffee was ready. They drank it seated together on the folding bed as they munched their pieces of the cake. Then Daru led the Arab under the shed and showed him the faucet where he washed. He went back into the room, folded the blankets and the bed, made his own bed and put the room in order. Then he went through the classroom and out onto the terrace. The sun was already rising in the blue sky; a soft, bright light was bathing the deserted plateau. On the ridge the snow was melting in spots. The stones were about to reappear. Crouched on the edge of the plateau, the schoolmaster looked at the deserted expanse. He thought of Balducci. He had hurt him, for he had sent him off in a way as if he didn’t want to be associated with him. He could still hear the gendarme’s farewell and, without knowing why, he felt strangely empty and vulnerable. At that

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moment, from the other side of the schoolhouse, the prisoner coughed. Daru listened to him almost despite himself and then, furious, threw a pebble that whistled through the air before sinking into the snow. That man’s stupid crime revolted him, but to hand him over was contrary to honor. Merely thinking of it made him smart with humiliation. And he cursed at one and the same time his own people who had sent him this Arab and the Arab too who had dared to kill and not managed to get away. Daru got up, walked in a circle on the terrace, waited motionless, and then went back into the schoolhouse.

The Arab, leaning over the cement floor of the shed, was washing his teeth with two fingers. Daru looked at him and said: “Come.” He went back into the room ahead of the prisoner. He slipped a hunting-jacket on over his sweater and put on walking-shoes. Standing, he waited until the Arab had put on his chèche and sandals. They went into the classroom and the schoolmaster pointed to the exit, saying: “Go ahead.” The fellow didn’t budge. “I’m coming,” said Daru. The Arab went out. Daru went back into the room and made a package of pieces of rusk,° dates, and sugar. In the classroom, before going out, he hesitated a second in front of his desk, then crossed the threshold and locked the door. “That’s the way,” he said. He started toward the east, followed by the prisoner. But, a short distance from the schoolhouse, he thought he heard a slight sound behind them. He retraced his steps and examined the surroundings of the house; there was no one there. The Arab watched him without seeming to understand. “Come on,” said Daru.

They walked for an hour and rested beside a sharp peak of limestone. The snow was melting faster and faster and the sun was drinking up the puddles at once, rapidly cleaning the plateau, which gradually dried and vibrated like the air itself. When they resumed walking, the ground rang under their feet. From time to time a bird rent the space in front of them with a joyful cry. Daru breathed in deeply the fresh morning light. He felt a sort of rapture before the vast familiar expanse, now almost entirely yellow under its dome of blue sky. They walked an hour more, descend- ing toward the south. They reached a level height made up of crumbly rocks. From there on, the plateau sloped down, eastward, toward a low plain where there were a few spindly trees and, to the south, toward outcroppings of rock that gave the landscape a chaotic look.

Daru surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but the sky on the horizon. Not a man could be seen. He turned toward the Arab, who was looking at him blankly. Daru held out the package to him. “Take it,” he said. “There are dates, bread, and sugar. You can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too.” The Arab took the package and the money but kept his

rusk: dry biscuit

full hands at chest level as if he didn’t know what to do with what was being given him. “Now look,” the schoolmaster said as he pointed in the direction of the east, “there’s the way to Tinguit. You have a two-hour walk. At Tin- guit you’ll find the administration and the police. They are expecting you.” The Arab looked toward the east, still holding the package and the money against his chest. Daru took his elbow and turned him rather roughly toward the south. At the foot of the height on which they stood could be seen a faint path. “That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s walk from here you’ll find pasturelands and the first nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter you according to their law.” The Arab had now turned toward Daru and a sort of panic was visible in his expression. “Listen,” he said. Daru shook his head: “No, be quiet. Now I’m leaving you.” He turned his back on him, took two long steps in the direction of the school, looked hesitantly at the motionless Arab, and started off again. For a few minutes he heard nothing but his own step resounding on the cold ground and did not turn his head. A moment later, however, he turned around. The Arab was still there on the edge of the hill, his arms hanging now, and he was looking at the schoolmaster. Daru felt something rise in his throat. But he swore with impatience, waved vaguely, and started off again. He had already gone some distance when he again stopped and looked. There was no longer anyone on the hill.

Daru hesitated. The sun was now rather high in the sky and was begin- ning to beat down on his head. The schoolmaster retraced his steps, at first somewhat uncertainly, then with decision. When he reached the little hill, he was bathed in sweat. He climbed it as fast as he could and stopped, out of breath, at the top. The rock-fields to the south stood out sharply against the blue sky, but on the plain to the east a steamy heat was already rising. And in that slight haze, Daru, with heavy heart, made out the Arab walk- ing slowly on the road to prison.

A little later, standing before the window of the classroom, the school- master was watching the clear light bathing the whole surface of the plateau, but he hardly saw it. Behind him on the blackboard, among the winding French rivers, sprawled the clumsily chalked-up words he had just read: “You handed over our brother. You will pay for this.” Daru looked at the sky, the plateau, and, beyond, the invisible lands stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. What is the central conflict of the story? Is it external or internal? Can it be defined in terms of dilemma?

2. Compare and contrast the attitudes of Daru and Balducci toward the prisoner and the situation. What is their attitude toward each other? Is either a bad or a cruel man? How does the conflict between Daru and Balducci intensify the central conflict?

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3. Why does Daru give the prisoner his freedom? What reasons are there for not giving him his freedom?

4. In what respect is the title ironic? Why does “The Guest” make a better title than “The Prisoner”? And why does the French title “L’Hôte” (which can mean either “The Guest” or “The Host”) make an even better title than its English translation?

5. This story contains the materials of explosive action—a revolver, a murderer, a state of undeclared war, an incipient uprising, a revenge note—but no violence occurs in the story. In what aspect of the situation is Camus principally interested?

6. This story has as its background a specific political situation—the French Algerian crisis in the years following World War II. How does Daru reflect France’s plight? Is the story’s meaning limited to this situation? What does the story tell us about good and evil and the nature of moral choice? How does the story differ in its treatment of these things from the typical Western story or the patriotic editorial?

7. In what respect is the ending of the story ironic? What kind of irony is this? What does it contribute to the meaning of the story?

8. Besides the ironies of the title and the ending, there are other ironies in the story. Find and explain them. Daru uses verbal irony in paragraph 11 when he exclaims, “Odd pupils!” Is verbal irony the same thing as sarcasm?

9. Comment on the following: (a) Daru’s behavior toward firearms and how it helps reveal him; (b) Camus’s reason for making the Arab a murderer ; (c) the Arab’s reason for taking the road to prison.

JOHN UPDIKE

A & P 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 for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

a & p First published in 1961. John Updike (1932–2009) was one of America’s most celebrated contemporary writers and a highly prolific, equally adept practitioner in many genres: the novel, the short story, poetry, and criticism. Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, he attended Harvard University and shortly after his graduation began publishing short stories in The New Yorker, the magazine with which his work is strongly identified. In his most characteristic fiction, he portrays the anxieties of middle-class life in a style of luminous clarity and realism.

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, with- out a push-cart, 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 mak- ing their shoulders round. She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white primadonna 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 delib- erate 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—bath- ing 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.

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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 houseslaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts 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 any- way, 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

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twenty-seven old freeloaders 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, sixpacks of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall 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 wonder- ing 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

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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 stencilled 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, get- ting 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.

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“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 sighs 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 won- dered. “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 tak- ing place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there’s no fum- bling 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 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 alumi- num 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.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Is Sammy a likable, sympathetic character? Why or why not? 2. Some of John Updike’s work, including this story, has been criticized for its por-

trayals of girls and women. Is Sammy’s attitude toward the girls “sexist”? Defend your position.

3. Analyze the importance of the setting. Why is a supermarket a significant and appropriate setting for this story?

4. Who is the antagonist of this narrative?

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364 CHAPTER SEVEN / HUMOR AND IRONY

5. Does Sammy have an epiphany anywhere in the story? Locate this moment and discuss its significance.

6. Discuss the humor and/or irony in the story. How do they affect the story’s meaning?

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. Write an essay exploring the use of irony in one of the following stories, or compare the use of irony in any two of the stories:

a. Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow” (page 79). b. Munro, “How I Met My Husband” (page 118). c. Walker, “Everyday Use” (page 147). d. Orozco, “Orientation” (page 334). e. Twain, “Cannibalism in the Cars” (page 339). f. O’Connor, “Revelation” (page 468). g. Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies” (page 653). h. Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (page 614).

2. Discuss the effect of humor in any of the following stories. Apart from its enter- tainment value, how does the humor contribute to the theme and significance of the story?

a. Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow” (page 79). b. Walker, “Everyday Use” (page 147). c. Orozco, “Orientation” (page 334). d. O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (page 438). e. Hurston, “Sweat” (page 583). f. Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (page 614).

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C H A P T E R E I G H T

Evaluating Fiction

Our purpose in the preceding chapters has been to develop not liter- ary critics but proficient readers—readers who choose wisely and read well. Yet good reading involves the ability to evaluate what we read, and mak- ing wise choices necessitates sound judgment. This does not mean that in order to read well we must decide whether Welty’s “A Worn Path” or Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is the “better” story, or whether Willa Cather is a “better” writer than Katherine Anne Porter. Any such judgments would be unpredictable, since in both these pairings equally intelligent readers might choose one or the other based on personal tastes and preferences. We do need, however, to be able to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious, the consequential and the trivial, the signifi- cant and the merely entertaining. Where such distinct categories are the issue, good readers will almost always reach the same conclusions.

There are no simple rules for literary judgment. Such judgment depends ultimately on sensitivity, intelligence, and experience; it is a prod- uct of how much and how alertly you have lived and how much and how well you have read. Yet there are at least two basic principles that may serve to help you form your own evaluations. First, every story should be judged initially by how fully it achieves its central purpose. In a first-rate story, every element works with every other element to accomplish the central purpose as economically and powerfully as possible. For this reason, no single ele- ment in a story should be judged in isolation.

In fact, isolating a single element for evaluation without considering the other fictional elements in a story can lead to a flawed evaluation. It would be a mistake, for instance, to criticize “The Guest” for not revealing what ultimately happens to Daru, since the theme of the story involves the unpredictability of the consequences of human choices in unfriendly condi- tions. We cannot say that “Miss Brill” and “Araby” are poor stories because they do not have exciting plots full of action and conflict: the effectiveness

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of a story’s plot can be judged only in relation to the other elements in a story and to its central purpose. In “Miss Brill” and “Araby,” of course, the relatively plotless quality of the narratives reflects the uneventful nature of the two characters’ lives.

Every first-rate story is an organic whole. All its parts should be related and all should be essential to the central purpose. We might ask, for example, whether the plot and characterizations of “The Most Dangerous Game” help to elucidate an important theme. Near the beginning of the story, there is a suggestion of theme. When Whitney declares that hunt- ing is a great sport—for the hunter, not for the jaguar—Rainsford replies, “Who cares how a jaguar feels? . . . They’ve no understanding.” To this, Whitney counters: “I rather think they understand one thing—fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death.” Evidently Rainsford has something to learn about how it feels to be hunted, and presumably during the hunt he learns it, for when General Zaroff turns back the first time—playing cat and mouse—we are told, “Then it was that Rainsford knew the full mean- ing of terror.” Later, on the morning of the third day, Rainsford awakens to the baying of hounds—“a sound that made him know that he had new things to learn about fear.” But little is made of Rainsford’s terror during the hunt. The story focuses instead on Malay man-catchers, Burmese tiger pits, Ugandan knife-throwers—in short, on the colorful and entertain- ing action. The story ends with the physical triumph of Rainsford over Zaroff, but has Rainsford been altered by the experience? Has he learned anything significant? Has he changed his attitudes toward hunting? We cannot answer, for the author’s major purpose has been not to develop these themes but to entertain the reader. There is no clear thematic connection between the final sentence—“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided”—and the question “Who cares how a jaguar feels?” Rather, the ending merely provokes a smile from the reader at Rainsford’s victory and at the cleverness of the author’s concluding flourish; it does not, however, encourage the reader to think further about the story as an artistic state- ment of any real import.

By contrast, Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow” is a far more thematically unified story. Throughout a varied group of scenes, the story develops the idea that human beings, like animals in the wild, engage constantly in a struggle for power. Tub is overweight and the most sympathetic of the three major characters, and both Frank and Kenny treat him cruelly at several key points. Once Kenny is wounded, however, and thereby becomes the “weakest” of the characters, Frank and Tub form a new alliance and Kenny becomes the odd man out. Ultimately the story makes clear that the more powerful individual in any relationship will behave in a cruel and cal- lous way toward the weaker individual. The reader finishes this masterful

CHAPTER EIGHT / EVALUATING FICTION 367

story thinking not about the bleak setting or the hunting trip it depicts but about the dark complexity of human relationships.

Once you have judged a story as successful in achieving its central purpose, you may consider a second principle of judgment: a story should also be judged by the significance of its purpose. When you determine that a story successfully integrates its materials into an organic unity, you should then evaluate the depth, the range, and the significance of what the story has achieved. This principle returns us to our distinction between commercial and literary fiction. If a story’s chief aim is to entertain, we may judge it to have less stature and significance than a story whose aim is to reveal important truths of human experience. “The Most Dangerous Game” and “Hunters in the Snow,” it could be argued, are equally successful in achieving their central purposes. But Wolff’s story is far more ambitious and significant than Connell’s. A critical consensus has developed that “Hunters in the Snow” is a contemporary masterpiece of short fiction, while Connell’s story is less highly regarded. Using other stories from the preceding chapters, we might also argue that “Once upon a Time” has a more ambitious, significant purpose than “Cannibalism in the Cars,” and that “Young Goodman Brown” has a more ambitious, significant purpose than “Miss Brill.” This is not to disparage either “Cannibalism in the Cars,” or “Miss Brill,” both of which are excellent stories, but to suggest that certain stories stake out larger thematic terrain and plumb the depths of human experience more profoundly than others.

A related evaluative principle is simply one of length. Most fiction takes the form of novels, not short stories, and while all the aspects of fic- tion we have discussed are represented in both longer and shorter forms, there is no doubt that a novel has the room to explore more varieties of human experience than does the short story, and that it has the leisure to explore them in greater depth. Obviously, then, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a greater work than his short story “Young Goodman Brown,” simply by virtue of its greater length and therefore its greater richness of characterization, plot, and language. It should be stressed, however, that length alone is not a significant criterion in evaluating a work of fiction. The very brief “Araby” is a more significant literary work, of course, than any 500-page romance or horror novel found on a best-seller list. But a serious literary author practicing the long form of the novel inevitably has greater opportunities for developing varieties of characters, exploring multiple themes, and providing richer and fuller artistic visions than the short story affords.

Again, as we stressed in discussing literary versus commercial fic- tion, you cannot evaluate stories by placing them into artificial categories; the evaluation of individual stories and novels is an ongoing process,

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and even the most informed evaluations do not remain fixed in time. For instance, the finest work of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and “Bartleby the Scrivener,” received scathing critical assessments and was virtually forgotten at the time of his death; yet today he is considered one of the most significant fiction writers of his era. Conversely, a short story called “Circumstance,” published by Harriet Prescott Spofford in 1860, was one of the most famous stories of the nineteenth century, highly praised by such discriminating readers as Emily Dickinson and Henry James; but today the story is seldom read except by scholars and historians. Therefore, when evaluating a work of fiction, you must be aware that you are judging it according to the aesthetic criteria of your own time and that such criteria evolve and change. Similarly, individual readers—including professional critics—may evaluate works differently at different points in their own lives. Some readers, for instance, might respond enthusiastically to a particular novel in their twenties, but in their fifties might reread the beloved novel and wonder why they rated it so highly. Although evaluating what you read is essential to developing your skill and insight, you must also be aware that any evaluation of a given work—your own, or that of the culture at large—may well change over time.

Ultimately, however, readers must rely on their own judgments, based on their accumulated experience with both literature and life.

R E V I E W I N G C H A P T E R E I G H T

1. Review the two basic principles required for evaluating fiction. 2. Describe the elements that make up a first-rate story. 3. Analyze the literary quality of Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”

versus Wolff ’s “Hunters in the Snow.” 4. Describe the importance of length in evaluating fiction. 5. Choose any two stories in this book and evaluate them

comparatively.

E X E R C I S E

The two stories that follow both have surprise endings, and in both cases the ending is integral to the story’s full meanings. Which story, in your estimation, deserves the higher ranking? Which gives the greater insight into significant human values? Support your choice with a reasoned and thorough analysis, using the study questions for what help they may provide.

MAUPASSANT / THE NECKLACE 369

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

The Necklace She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as

if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public Instructions.

She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was as unhappy as though she had really fallen from her proper station, since with women there is neither caste nor rank: and beauty, grace, and charm act instead of family and birth. Natural fineness, instinct for what is elegant, suppleness of wit, are the sole hierarchy, and make from women of the people the equals of the very greatest ladies.

She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries. She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the wretched look of the walls, from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry. The sight of the little Breton peasant, who did her humble housework aroused in her regrets which were despairing, and distracted dreams. She thought of the silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, lit by tall bronze candelabra, and of the two great footmen in knee breeches who sleep in the big armchairs, made drowsy by the heavy warmth of the hot-air stove. She thought of the long salons fitted up with ancient silk, of the delicate furni- ture carrying priceless curiosities, and of the coquettish perfumed boudoirs made for talks at five o’clock with intimate friends, with men famous and sought after, whom all women envy and whose attention they all desire.

When she sat down to dinner, before the round table covered with a tablecloth three days old, opposite her husband, who uncovered the soup tureen and declared with an enchanted air, “Ah, the good pot-au-feu!o I  don’t know anything better than that,” she thought of dainty dinners, of shining silverware, of tapestry which peopled the walls with ancient personages and with strange birds flying in the midst of a fairy forest; and she thought of delicious dishes served on marvelous plates, and of the whis- pered gallantries which you listen to with a sphinxlike smile, while you are eating the pink flesh of a trout or the wings of a quail.

the necklace First published in 1884; translated by Marjorie Laurie. Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) was one of the most prolific short-story writers of his era, producing almost 300 stories in his short life. His work—including “The Necklace,” his best-known tale—exerted an enormous influence on such subsequent writers as Kate Chopin and Joseph Conrad.

pot-au-feu: beef stew

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She had no dresses, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that; she felt made for that. She would so have liked to please, to be envied, to be charming, to be sought after.

She had a friend, a former schoolmate at the convent, who was rich, and whom she did not like to go and see any more, because she suffered so much when she came back.

But one evening, her husband returned home with a triumphant air, and, holding a large envelope in his hand.

“There,” said he. “Here is something for you.” She tore the paper sharply, and drew out a printed card which bore

these words: “The Minister of Public Instruction and Mme. Georges Ramponneau

request the honor of M. and Mme. Loisel’s company at the palace of the Ministry on Monday evening, January eighteenth.”

Instead of being delighted, as her husband hoped, she threw the invi- tation on the table with disdain, murmuring:

“What do you want me to do with that?” “But, my dear, I thought you would be glad. You never go out, and

this is such a fine opportunity. I had awful trouble to get it. Everyone wants to go; it is very select, and they are not giving many invitations to clerks. The whole official world will be there.”

She looked at him with an irritated glance, and said, impatiently: “And what do you want me to put on my back?” He had not thought of that; he stammered: “Why, the dress you go to the theater in. It looks very well, to me.” He stopped, distracted, seeing his wife was crying. Two great tears

descended slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the corners of her mouth. He stuttered:

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” But, by violent effort, she had conquered her grief, and she replied,

with a calm voice, while she wiped her wet cheeks: “Nothing. Only I have no dress and therefore I can’t go to this ball.

Give your card to some colleague whose wife is better equipped than I.” He was in despair. He resumed: “Come, let us see, Mathilde. How much would it cost, a suitable dress,

which you could use on other occasions. Something very simple?” She reflected several seconds, making her calculations and wondering

also what sum she could ask without drawing on herself an immediate refusal and a frightened exclamation from the economical clerk.

Finally, she replied, hesitatingly: “I don’t know exactly, but I think I could manage it with four hundred

francs.”

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He had grown a little pale, because he was laying aside just that amount to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre, with several friends who went to shoot larks down there, of a Sunday.

But he said: “All right. I will give you four hundred francs. And try to have a

pretty dress.” The day of the ball drew near, and Mme. Loisel seemed sad, uneasy,

anxious. Her dress was ready, however. Her husband said to her one evening: “What is the matter? Come, you’ve been so queer these last three days.” And she answered: “It annoys me not to have a single jewel, not a single stone, nothing

to put on. I shall look like distress. I should almost rather not go at all.” He resumed: “You might wear natural flowers. It’s very stylish at this time of the

year. For ten francs you can get two or three magnificent roses.” She was not convinced. “No; there’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other

women who are rich.” But her husband cried: “How stupid you are! Go look up your friend Mme. Forestier, and

ask her to lend you some jewels. You’re quite thick enough with her to do that.”

She uttered a cry of joy: “It’s true. I never thought of it.” The next day she went to her friend and told of her distress. Mme. Forestier went to a wardrobe with a glass door, took out a large

jewelbox, brought it back, opened it, and said to Mme. Loisel: “Choose, choose, my dear.” She saw first of all some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a

Venetian cross, gold and precious stones of admirable workmanship. She tried on the ornaments before the glass, hesitated, could not make up her mind to part with them, to give them back. She kept asking:

“Haven’t you any more?” “Why, yes. Look. I don’t know what you like.” All of a sudden she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb neck-

lace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, outside her high necked dress, and remained lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.

Then she asked, hesitating, filled with anguish: “Can you lend me that, only that?”

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“Why, yes, certainly.” She sprang upon the neck of her friend, kissed her passionately, then

fled with her treasure. The day of the ball arrived. Mme. Loisel made a great success. She

was prettier than them all, elegant, gracious, smiling, and crazy with joy. All the men looked at her, asked her name, endeavored to be introduced. All the attachés of the Cabinet wanted to waltz with her. She was remarked by the minister himself.

She danced with intoxication, with passion, made drunk by pleasure, forgetting all, in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness composed of all this homage, of all this admira- tion, of all these awakened desires, and of that sense of complete victory which is so sweet to a woman’s heart.

She went away about four o’clock in the morning. Her husband had been sleeping since midnight, in a little deserted anteroom, with three other gentlemen whose wives were having a good time. He threw over her shoulders the wraps which he had brought, modest wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress. She felt this, and wanted to escape so as not to be remarked by the other women, who were enveloping themselves in costly furs.

Loisel held her back. “Wait a bit. You will catch cold outside. I will go and call a cab.” But she did not listen to him, and rapidly descended the stairs. When

they were in the street they did not find a carriage; and they began to look for one, shouting after the cabmen whom they saw passing by at a distance.

They went down toward the Seine, in despair, shivering with cold. At last they found on the quay one of those ancient noctambulant coupés which, exactly as if they were ashamed to show their misery during the day, are never seen round Paris until after nightfall.

It took them to their door in the Rue des Martyrs, and once more, sadly, they climbed up homeward. All was ended, for her. And as to him, he reflected that he must be at the Ministry at ten o’clock.

She removed the wraps which covered her shoulders before the glass, so as once more to see herself in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered a cry. She no longer had the necklace around her neck!

Her husband, already half undressed, demanded: “What is the matter with you?” She turned madly toward him: “I have—I have—I’ve lost Mme. Forestier’s necklace.” He stood up, distracted. “What!—how?—impossible!”

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And they looked in the folds of her dress, in the folds of her cloak, in her pockets, everywhere. They did not find it.

He asked: “You’re sure you had it on when you left the ball?” “Yes, I felt it in the vestibule of the palace.” “But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it fall. It

must be in the cab.” “Yes. Probably. Did you take his number?” “No. And you, didn’t you notice it?” “No.” They looked, thunderstruck, at one another. At last Loisel put on his

clothes. “I shall go back on foot,” said he, “over the whole route which we have

taken to see if I can find it.” And he went out. She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without

strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without fire, without a thought. Her husband came back about seven o’clock. He had found nothing. He went to Police Headquarters, to the newspaper offices, to offer a

reward; he went to the cab companies—everywhere, in fact, whither he was urged by the least suspicion of hope.

She waited all day, in the same condition of mad fear before this ter- rible calamity.

Loisel returned at night with a hollow, pale face; he had discovered nothing.

“You must write to your friend,” said he, “that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give us time to turn round.”

She wrote at his dictation. At the end of a week they had lost all hope. And Loisel, who had aged five years, declared: “We must consider how to replace that ornament.” The next day they took the box which had contained it, and they

went to the jeweler whose name was found within. He consulted his books.

“It was not I, madame, who sold that necklace; I must simply have furnished the case.”

Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like the other, consulting their memories, sick both of them with chagrin and anguish.

They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds which seemed to them exactly like the one they looked for. It was worth forty thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.

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So they begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days yet. And they made a bargain that he should buy it back for thirty-four thousand francs, in case they found the other one before the end of February.

Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He would borrow the rest.

He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, took up ruinous obligations, dealt with usurers and all the race of lenders. He compromised all the rest of his life, risked his signature without even knowing if he could meet it; and, frightened by the pains yet to come, by the black misery which was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privation and of all the moral tortures which lie was to suffer, he went to get the new neck- lace, putting down upon the merchant’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.

When Mme. Loisel took back the necklace, Mme. Forestier said to her, with a chilly manner:

“You should have returned it sooner; I might have needed it.” She did not open the case, as her friend had so much feared. If she had

detected the substitution, what would she have thought, what would she have said? Would she not have taken Mme. Loisel for a thief?

Mme. Loisel now knew the horrible existence of the needy. She took her part, moreover, all of a sudden, with heroism. That dreadful debt must be paid. She would pay it. They dismissed their servant; they changed their lodgings; they rented a garret under the roof.

She came to know what heavy housework meant and the odious cares of the kitchen. She washed the dishes, using her rosy nails on the greasy pots and pans. She washed the dirty linen, the shirts, and the dishcloths, which she dried upon a line; she carried the slops down to the street every morning, and carried up the water, stopping for breath at every landing. And, dressed like a woman of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher, her basket on her arm, bargaining, insulted, defending her miserable money sou by sou.

Each month they had to meet some notes, renew others, obtain more time. Her husband worked in the evening making a fair copy of some

tradesman’s accounts, and late at night he often copied manuscript for five sous a page.

And this life lasted for ten years. At the end of ten years, they had paid everything, everything, with the

rates of usury, and the accumulations of the compound interest. Mme. Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impov-

erished households—strong and hard and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts askew, and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great swishes of water. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she

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sat down near the window, and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful and so fêted.

What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!

But, one Sunday, having gone to take a walk in the Champs Elysées to refresh herself from the labor of the week, she suddenly perceived a woman who was leading a child. It was Mme. Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still charming.

Mme. Loisel felt moved. Was she going to speak to her? Yes, cer- tainly. And now that she had paid, she was going to tell her all about it. Why not?

She went up. “Good-day, Jeanne.” The other, astonished to be familiarly addressed by this plain good-

wife, did not recognize her at all, and stammered. “But—madam!—I do not know—you must be mistaken.” “No. I am Mathilde Loisel.” Her friend uttered a cry. “Oh, my poor Mathilde! How you are changed!” “Yes, I have had days hard enough, since I have seen you, days

wretched enough—and that because of you!” “Of me! How so?” “Do you remember that diamond necklace which you lent me to wear

at the ministerial ball?” “Yes. Well?” “Well, I lost it.” “What do you mean? You brought it back.” “I brought you back another just like it. And for this we have been

ten years paying. You can understand that it was not easy for us, who had nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad.”

Mme. Forestier had stopped. “You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?” “Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very like.” And she smiled with a joy which was proud and naïve at once. Mme. Forestier, strongly moved, took her two hands. “Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste. It was worth at

most five hundred francs!”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Is Mathilde a sympathetic or unsympathetic character? Does your view of her change as the story develops?

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2. Describe the plot structure of “The Necklace.” How does the author achieve suspense?

3. What is the relationship between Mathilde and her husband? Is theirs a normal, loving partnership? How might the story differ in this respect if written today?

4. Discuss the surprise ending. Was this ending predictable or was it a genuine surprise?

5. Does the story make a larger statement about human nature, transcending the merely surprising ending? Or was the entire story written merely to surprise and entertain the reader?

EDITH WHARTON

Roman Fever 1

From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval.

As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. “Well, come along, then,” it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, “and let’s leave the young things to their knitting”; and a voice as fresh laughed back: “Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—” “Well, I mean figuratively,” rejoined the first. “After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much else to do. . . .” and at that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue.

The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and colored slightly.

“Barbara!” she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mock- ing voice in the stairway.

The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in color, with a small deter- mined nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humored laugh. “That’s what our daughters think of us!”

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roman fever First published in 1934. Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born into a socially prominent New York family and was privately educated by governesses and tutors. She married in 1885 and began a financially and critically successful writing career in 1890. After frequent visits to Europe beginning in her childhood, she took up permanent residence in France. Both she and her husband had a history of adulterous affairs, and she divorced him in 1913; she had no children. “Roman fever” was the name given to a type of malaria prevalent in Rome in the nineteenth century.

376 CHAPTER EIGHT / EVALUATING FICTION

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Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us individu- ally. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—” Half-guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. “One never knows,” she murmured. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill; and sometimes I get tired just looking, —even at this.” Her gesture was now addressed to the stupendous scene at their feet.

The dark lady laughed again, and they both relapsed upon the view, contemplating it in silence, with a sort of diffused serenity which might have been borrowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies. The luncheon hour was long past, and the two had their end of the vast terrace to themselves. At its opposite extremity a few groups, detained by a linger- ing look at the outspread city, were gathering up guidebooks and fumbling for tips. The last of them scattered, and the two ladies were alone on the air-washed height.

“Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t just stay here,” said Mrs. Slade, the lady of the high color and energetic brows. Two derelict basket chairs stood near, and she pushed them into the angle of the parapet, and settled herself in one, her gaze upon the Palatine. “After all, it’s still the most beautiful view in the world.”

“It always will be, to me,” assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a stress on the “me” that Mrs. Slade, though she noticed it, won- dered if it were not merely accidental, like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter writers.

“Grace Ansley was always old-fashioned,” she thought; and added aloud, with a retrospective smile: “It’s a view we’ve both been familiar with for a good many years. When we first met here we were younger than our girls are now. You remember?”

“Oh, yes, I remember,” murmured Mrs. Ansley, with the same unde- finable stress. “There’s that headwaiter wondering,” she interpolated. She was evidently far less sure than her companion of herself and of her rights in the world.

“I’ll cure him of wondering,” said Mrs. Slade, stretching her hand toward a bag as discreetly opulent-looking as Mrs. Ansley’s. Signing to the headwaiter, she explained that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and would like to spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view—that is, if it did not disturb the service? The headwaiter, bow- ing over her gratuity, assured her that the ladies were most welcome, and would be still more so if they would condescend to remain for dinner. A full-moon night, they would remember. . . .

Mrs. Slade’s black brows drew together, as though references to the moon were out of place and even unwelcome. But she smiled away her frown as the headwaiter retreated. “Well, why not? We might do worse.

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There’s no knowing, I suppose, when the girls will be back. Do you even know back from where? I don’t!”

Mrs. Ansley again colored slightly. “I think those young Italian aviators we met at the Embassy invited them to fly to Tarquinia for tea. I suppose they’ll want to wait and fly back by moonlight.”

“Moonlight—moonlight! What a part it still plays. Do you suppose they’re as sentimental as we were?”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t in the least know what they are,” said Mrs. Ansley. “And perhaps we didn’t know much more about each other.”

“No; perhaps we didn’t.” Her friend gave her a shy glance. “I never should have supposed you

were sentimental, Alida.” “Well, perhaps I wasn’t.” Mrs. Slade drew her lids together in ret-

rospect; and for a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected how little they knew each other. Each one, of course, had a label ready to attach to the other’s name; Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told herself, or anyone who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years ago, had been exquisitely lovely—no, you wouldn’t believe it, would you? . . . though, of course, still charming, distinguished. . . . Well, as a girl she had been exquisite; far more beautiful than her daughter Barbara, though certainly Babs, according to the new standards at any rate, was more effective—had more edge, as they say. Funny where she got it, with those two nullities as parents. Yes; Horace Ansley was—well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York. Good-looking, irreproachable, exemplary. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-room curtains in No. 20 East 73rd Street were renewed, No. 23, across the way, was always aware of it. And of all the movings, buy- ings, travels, anniversaries, illnesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs. Slade. But she had grown bored with it by the time her husband made his big coup in Wall Street, and when they bought in upper Park Avenue had already begun to think: “I’d rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided.” The idea of see- ing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley. She hoped not, but didn’t much mind. Those were the days when respectability was at a discount, and it did the irreproachable no harm to laugh at them a little.

A few years later, and not many months apart, both ladies lost their husbands. There was an appropriate exchange of wreaths and condolences, and a brief renewal of intimacy in the half-shadow of their mourning; and

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now, after another interval, they had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them the modest appendage of a salient daughter. The similarity of their lot had again drawn them together, lending itself to mild jokes, and the mutual confession that, if in old days it must have been tiring to “keep up” with daughters, it was now, at times, a little dull not to.

No doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor Grace ever would. It was a big drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional couple they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable. As the wife of the famous corporation lawyer, always with an international case or two on hand, every day brought its exciting and unexpected obligation: the impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad, the hurried dashes on legal business to London, Paris or Rome, where the entertaining was so handsomely recip- rocated; the amusement of hearing in her wake: “What, that handsome woman with the good clothes and the eyes is Mrs. Slade—the Slade’s wife? Really? Generally the wives of celebrities are such frumps.”

Yes; being the Slade’s widow was a dullish business after that. In living up to such a husband all her faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter to live up to, for the son who seemed to have inherited his father’s gifts had died suddenly in boyhood. She had fought through that agony because her husband was there, to be helped and to help; now, after the father’s death, the thought of the boy had become unbearable. There was nothing left but to mother her daughter; and dear Jenny was such a perfect daughter that she needed no excessive mothering. “Now with Babs Ansley I don’t know that I should be so quiet,” Mrs. Slade sometimes half- enviously reflected; but Jenny, who was younger than her brilliant friend, was that rare accident, an extremely pretty girl who somehow made youth and prettiness seem as safe as their absence. It was all perplexing—and to Mrs. Slade a little boring. She wished that Jenny would fall in love—with the wrong man, even; that she might have to be watched, out-maneuvered, rescued. And instead, it was Jenny who watched her mother, kept her out of drafts, made sure that she had taken her tonic. . . .

Mrs. Ansley was much less articulate than her friend, and her mental portrait of Mrs. Slade was slighter, and drawn with fainter touches. “Alida Slade’s awfully brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks,” would have summed it up; though she would have added, for the enlightenment of strangers, that Mrs. Slade had been an extremely dashing girl; much more so than her daughter, who was pretty, of course, and clever in a way, but had none of her mother’s—well, “vividness,” someone had once called it. Mrs. Ansley would take up current words like this, and cite them in

WHARTON / ROMAN FEVER 379

quotation marks, as unheard-of audacities. No; Jenny was not like her mother. Sometimes Mrs. Ansley thought Alida Slade was disappointed; on the whole she had had a sad life. Full of failures and mistakes; Mrs. Ansley had always been rather sorry for her. . . .

So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope.

2 For a long time they continued to sit side by side without speak-

ing. It seemed as though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori° which faced them. Mrs. Slade sat quite still, her eyes fixed on the golden slope of the Palace of the Caesars, and after a while Mrs. Ansley ceased to fidget with her bag, and she too sank into meditation. Like many intimate friends, the two ladies had never before had occasion to be silent together, and Mrs. Ansley was slightly embarrassed by what seemed, after so many years, a new stage in their intimacy, and one with which she did not yet know how to deal.

Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodi- cally covers Rome with a roof of silver. Mrs. Slade glanced at her wrist- watch. “Five o’clock already,” she said, as though surprised.

Mrs. Ansley suggested interrogatively: “There’s bridge at the Embassy at five.” For a long time Mrs. Slade did not answer. She appeared to be lost in contemplation, and Mrs. Ansley thought the remark had escaped her. But after a while she said, as if speaking out of a dream: “Bridge, did you say? Not unless you want to. . . . But I don’t think I will, you know.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Ansley hastened to assure her. “I don’t care to at all. It’s so lovely here; and so full of old memories, as you say.” She settled her- self in her chair, and almost furtively drew forth her knitting. Mrs. Slade took sideway note of this activity, but her own beautifully cared-for hands remained motionless on her knee.

“I was just thinking,” she said slowly, “what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travelers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be guarded!— to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street. They don’t know it—but how much they’re missing!”

The long golden light was beginning to pale, and Mrs. Ansley lifted her knitting a little closer to her eyes. “Yes; how we were guarded!”

“I always used to think,” Mrs. Slade continued, “that our mothers had a much more difficult job than our grandmothers. When Roman fever

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Memento Mori: reminder of mortality (Latin: literally, “remember that you must die”)

380 CHAPTER EIGHT / EVALUATING FICTION

stalked the streets it must have been comparatively easy to gather in the girls at the danger hour; but when you and I were young, with such beauty calling us, and the spice of disobedience thrown in, and no worse risk than catching cold during the cool hour after sunset, the mothers used to be put to it to keep us in—didn’t they?”

She turned again toward Mrs. Ansley, but the latter had reached a delicate point in her knitting. “One, two, three—slip two; yes, they must have been,” she assented, without looking up.

Mrs. Slade’s eyes rested on her with a deepened attention. “She can knit—in the face of this! How like her. . . .”

Mrs. Slade leaned back, brooding, her eyes ranging from the ruins which faced her to the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum. Suddenly she thought: “It’s all very well to say that our girls have done away with sentiment and moonlight. But if Babs Ansley isn’t out to catch that young aviator—the one who’s a Marchese—then I don’t know any- thing. And Jenny has no chance beside her. I know that too. I wonder if that’s why Grace Ansley likes the two girls to go everywhere together? My poor Jenny as a foil—!” Mrs. Slade gave a hardly audible laugh, and at the sound Mrs. Ansley dropped her knitting.

“Yes—?” “I—oh, nothing. I was only thinking how your Babs carries everything

before her. That Campolieri boy is one of the best matches in Rome. Don’t look so innocent, my dear—you know he is. And I was wondering, ever so respectfully, you understand . . . wondering how two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic.” Mrs. Slade laughed again, with a touch of asperity.

Mrs. Ansley’s hands lay inert across her needles. She looked straight out at the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor at her feet. But her small profile was almost expressionless. At length she said: “I think you overrate Babs, my dear.”

Mrs. Slade’s tone grew easier. “No; I don’t. I appreciate her. And per- haps envy you. Oh, my girl’s perfect; if I were a chronic invalid I’d—well, I think I’d rather be in Jenny’s hands. There must be times . . . but there! I always wanted a brilliant daughter . . . and never quite understood why I got an angel instead.”

Mrs. Ansley echoed her laugh in a faint murmur. “Babs is an angel too.” “Of course—of course! But she’s got rainbow wings. Well, they’re

wandering by the sea with their young men; and here we sit . . . and it all brings back the past a little too acutely.”

Mrs. Ansley had resumed her knitting. One might almost have imag- ined (if one had known her less well, Mrs. Slade reflected) that, for her also,

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too many memories rose from the lengthening shadows of those august ruins. But no; she was simply absorbed in her work. What was there for her to worry about? She knew that Babs would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely eligible Campolieri. “And she’ll sell the New York house, and settle down near them in Rome, and never be in their way . . . she’s much too tactful. But she’ll have an excellent cook, and just the right people in for bridge and cocktails . . . and a perfectly peaceful old age among her grandchildren.”

Mrs. Slade broke off this prophetic flight with a recoil of self-disgust. There was no one of whom she had less right to think unkindly than of Grace Ansley. Would she never cure herself of envying her? Perhaps she had begun too long ago.

She stood up and leaned against the parapet, filling her troubled eyes with the tranquilizing magic of the hour. But instead of tranquilizing her the sight seemed to increase her exasperation. Her gaze turned toward the Colosseum. Already its golden flank was drowned in purple shadow, and above it the sky curved crystal clear, without light or color. It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in mid-heaven.

Mrs. Slade turned back and laid her hand on her friend’s arm. The gesture was so abrupt that Mrs. Ansley looked up, startled.

“The sun’s set. You’re not afraid, my dear?” “Afraid—?” “Of Roman fever or pneumonia? I remember how ill you were that

winter. As a girl you had a very delicate throat, hadn’t you?” “Oh, we’re all right up here. Down below, in the Forum, it does get

deathly cold, all of a sudden . . . but not here.” “Ah, of course you know because you had to be so careful.” Mrs. Slade

turned back to the parapet. She thought: “I must make one more effort not to hate her.” Aloud she said: “Whenever I look at the Forum from up here, I remember that story about a great-aunt of yours, wasn’t she? A dreadfully wicked great-aunt?”

“Oh, yes; great-aunt Harriet. The one who was supposed to have sent her young sister out to the Forum after sunset to gather a night-blooming flower for her album. All our great-aunts and grandmothers used to have albums of dried flowers.”

Mrs. Slade nodded. “But she really sent her because they were in love with the same man—”

“Well, that was the family tradition. They said Aunt Harriet confessed it years afterward. At any rate, the poor little sister caught the fever and died. Mother used to frighten us with the story when we were children.”

“And you frightened me with it, that winter when you and I were here as girls. The winter I was engaged to Delphin.”

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Mrs. Ansley gave a faint laugh. “Oh, did I? Really frightened you? I don’t believe you’re easily frightened.”

“Not often; but I was then. I was easily frightened because I was too happy. I wonder if you know what that means?”

“I—yes . . .” Mrs. Ansley faltered. “Well, I suppose that was why the story of your wicked aunt made

such an impression on me. And I thought: ‘There’s no more Roman fever, but the Forum is deathly cold after sunset—especially after a hot day. And the Colosseum’s even colder and damper.’”

“The Colosseum—?” “Yes. It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night.

Far from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed; it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You knew that?”

“I—I dare say. I don’t remember.” “You don’t remember? You don’t remember going to visit some ruins

or other one evening, just after dark, and catching a bad chill? You were supposed to have gone to see the moon rise. People always said that expedi- tion was what caused your illness.”

There was a moment’s silence; then Mrs. Ansley rejoined: “Did they? It was all so long ago.”

“Yes. And you got well again—so it didn’t matter. But I suppose it struck your friends—the reason given for your illness, I mean—because everybody knew you were so prudent on account of your throat, and your mother took such care of you. . . . You had been out late sightseeing, hadn’t you, that night?”

“Perhaps I had. The most prudent girls aren’t always prudent. What made you think of it now?”

Mrs. Slade seemed to have no answer ready. But after a moment she broke out: “Because I simply can’t bear it any longer—!”

Mrs. Ansley lifted her head quickly. Her eyes were wide and very pale. “Can’t bear what?”

“Why—your not knowing that I’ve always known why you went.” “Why I went—?” “Yes. You think I’m bluffing, don’t you? Well, you went to meet the

man I was engaged to—and I can repeat every word of the letter that took you there.”

While Mrs. Slade spoke Mrs. Ansley had risen unsteadily to her feet. Her bag, her knitting and gloves, slid in a panic-stricken heap to the ground. She looked at Mrs. Slade as though she were looking at a ghost.

“No, no—don’t,” she faltered out. “Why not? Listen, if you don’t believe me. ‘My one darling, things can’t

go on like this. I must see you alone. Come to the Colosseum immediately

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after dark tomorrow. There will be somebody to let you in. No one whom you need fear will suspect’—but perhaps you’ve forgotten what the letter said?”

Mrs. Ansley met the challenge with an unexpected composure. Steady- ing herself against the chair she looked at her friend, and replied: “No; I know it by heart too.”

“And the signature? ‘Only your D.S.’ Was that it? I’m right, am I? That was the letter that took you out that evening after dark?”

Mrs. Ansley was still looking at her. It seemed to Mrs. Slade that a slow struggle was going on behind the voluntarily controlled mask of her small quiet face. “I shouldn’t have thought she had herself so well in hand,” Mrs. Slade reflected, almost resentfully. But at this moment Mrs. Ansley spoke. “I don’t know how you knew. I burnt that letter at once.”

“Yes; you would, naturally—you’re so prudent!” The sneer was open now. “And if you burnt the letter you’re wondering how on earth I know what was in it. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Slade waited, but Mrs. Ansley did not speak. “Well, my dear, I know what was in that letter because I wrote it!” “You wrote it?” “Yes.” The two women stood for a minute staring at each other in the last

golden light. Then Mrs. Ansley dropped back into her chair. “Oh,” she murmured, and covered her face with her hands.

Mrs. Slade waited nervously for another word or movement. None came, and at length she broke out: “I horrify you.”

Mrs. Ansley’s hands dropped to her knee. The face they uncovered was streaked with tears. “I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking—it was the only letter I ever had from him!”

“And I wrote it. Yes; I wrote it! But I was the girl he was engaged to. Did you happen to remember that?”

Mrs. Ansley’s head drooped again. “I’m not trying to excuse myself . . . I remembered. . . .”

“And still you went?” “Still I went.” Mrs. Slade stood looking down on the small bowed figure at her side.

The flame of her wrath had already sunk, and she wondered why she had ever thought there would be any satisfaction in inflicting so purposeless a wound on her friend. But she had to justify herself.

“You do understand? I’d found out—and I hated you, hated you. I knew you were in love with Delphin—and I was afraid; afraid of you, of your quiet ways, your sweetness . . . your . . . well, I wanted you out of the way, that’s all. Just for a few weeks; just till I was sure of him. So in a blind fury I wrote that letter . . . I don’t know why I’m telling you now.”

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“I suppose,” said Mrs. Ansley slowly, “it’s because you’ve always gone on hating me.”

“Perhaps. Or because I wanted to get the whole thing off my mind.” She paused. “I’m glad you destroyed the letter. Of course I never thought you’d die.”

Mrs. Ansley relapsed into silence, and Mrs. Slade, leaning above her, was conscious of a strange sense of isolation, of being cut off from the warm current of human communion. “You think me a monster!”

“I don’t know. . . . It was the only letter I had, and you say he didn’t write it?”

“Ah, how you care for him still!” “I cared for that memory,” said Mrs. Ansley. Mrs. Slade continued to look down on her. She seemed physically

reduced by the blow—as if, when she got up, the wind might scatter her like a puff of dust. Mrs. Slade’s jealousy suddenly leapt up again at the sight. All these years the woman had been living on that letter. How she must have loved him, to treasure the mere memory of its ashes! The letter of the man her friend was engaged to. Wasn’t it she who was the monster?

“You tried your best to get him away from me, didn’t you? But you failed; and I kept him. That’s all.”

“Yes. That’s all.” “I wish now I hadn’t told you. I’d no idea you’d feel about it as you do;

I thought you’d be amused. It all happened so long ago, as you say; and you must do me the justice to remember that I had no reason to think you’d ever taken it seriously. How could I, when you were married to Horace Ansley two months afterward? As soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence and married you. People were rather surprised— they wondered at its being done so quickly; but I thought I knew. I had an idea you did it out of pique—to be able to say you’d got ahead of Delphin and me. Girls have such silly reasons for doing the most serious things. And your marrying so soon convinced me that you’d never really cared.”

“Yes. I suppose it would,” Mrs. Ansley assented. The clear heaven overhead was emptied of all its gold. Dusk spread over

it, abruptly darkening the Seven Hills. Here and there lights began to twinkle through the foliage at their feet. Steps were coming and going on the deserted terrace—waiters looking out of the doorway at the head of the stairs, then reappearing with trays and napkins and flasks of wine. Tables were moved, chairs straightened. A feeble string of electric lights flickered out. Some vases of faded flowers were carried away, and brought back replenished. A stout lady in a dust coat suddenly appeared, asking in broken Italian if anyone had seen the elastic band which held together her tattered Baedeker.° She poked with her stick under the table at which she had lunched, the waiters assisting.

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Baedeker: tourist guidebook (one of a series issued by the German publisher Karl Baedeker)

WHARTON / ROMAN FEVER 385

The corner where Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley sat was still shadowy and deserted. For a long time neither of them spoke. At length Mrs. Slade began again: “I suppose I did it as a sort of joke—”

“A joke?” “Well, girls are ferocious sometimes, you know. Girls in love espe-

cially. And I remember laughing to myself all that evening at the idea that you were waiting around there in the dark, dodging out of sight, listening for every sound, trying to get in—Of course I was upset when I heard you were so ill afterward.”

Mrs. Ansley had not moved for a long time. But now she turned slowly toward her companion. “But I didn’t wait. He’d arranged everything. He was there. We were let in at once,” she said.

Mrs. Slade sprang up from her leaning position. “Delphin there? They let you in?— Ah, now you’re lying!” she burst out with violence.

Mrs. Ansley’s voice grew clearer, and full of surprise. “But of course he was there. Naturally he came—”

“Came? How did he know he’d find you there? You must be raving!” Mrs. Ansley hesitated, as though reflecting. “But I answered the letter.

I told him I’d be there. So he came.” Mrs. Slade flung her hands up to her face. “Oh, God—you answered!

I never thought of your answering. . . .” “It’s odd you never thought of it, if you wrote the letter.” “Yes. I was blind with rage.” Mrs. Ansley rose, and drew her fur scarf about her. “It is cold here.

We’d better go . . . I’m sorry for you,” she said, as she clasped the fur about her throat.

The unexpected words sent a pang through Mrs. Slade. “Yes; we’d bet- ter go.” She gathered up her bag and cloak. “I don’t know why you should be sorry for me,” she muttered.

Mrs. Ansley stood looking away from her toward the dusky secret mass of the Colosseum. “Well—because I didn’t have to wait that night.”

Mrs. Slade gave an unquiet laugh. “Yes; I was beaten there. But I oughtn’t to begrudge it to you, I suppose. At the end of all these years. After all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn’t write.”

Mrs. Ansley was again silent. At length she turned toward the door of the terrace. She took a step, and turned back, facing her companion.

“I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway.

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Q U E S T I O N S

1. Characterize Grace Ansley and Alida Slade as fully as you can. By what character- izing devices does the story imply the superiority of Mrs. Slade (what gestures, what statements, what unspoken thoughts)? At what point does Mrs. Ansley begin to seem the superior person?

2. What is the meaning of the comment about “the wrong end of [the] little telescope” (paragraph 24)? How is that comment a suitable conclusion for the first part of the story?

3. Trace the revelation of the animosity that Mrs. Slade feels for Mrs. Ansley. Is Mrs. Ansley doing anything on this evening to provoke her envy? Why has Mrs. Slade always harbored negative feelings about her friend?

4. What purpose is served by the discussion of the different meanings of Rome to mothers and daughters of different generations (paragraphs 29–31)? What standards of behavior have changed from one generation to the next? What standards have remained the same? How does this discussion expand the mean- ing of the title of the story?

5. Discuss the surprise ending. How does Wharton prepare for this ending earlier in the story?

6. Which of the two women does the story judge more harshly? Which is more likable and sympathetic?

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R W R I T I N G

1. Write an essay evaluating the relative quality of any of the following pairs of stories. Decide which is the better story, and support your argument fully:

a. Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game” (page 62) and Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers” (page 564).

b. Walker, “Everyday Use” (page 147) and Hurston, “Sweat” (page 583). c. Maupassant, “The Necklace” (page 369) and Wharton, “Roman Fever”

(page 376). d. Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (page 614) and Poe, “The Fall of the House of

Usher” (page 675). e. Maupassant, “The Necklace” (page 369) and Oates, “The Scarf ” (page 530).

2. Write an essay in which you argue for the literary quality of any one of the fol- lowing stories, detailing its successful use of the elements of fiction:

a. Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies” (page 653). b. Joyce, “Araby” (page 186). c. Gordimer, “Once upon a Time” (page 234). d. Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (page 392). e. Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (page 614). f. O’Connor, “Revelation” (page 468). g. Wharton, “Roman Fever” (page 376).

SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING 387

FICTION

Three Featured

Writers

Nathaniel Hawthorne Flannery O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates

390 FICTION / THREE FEATURED WRITERS

Introduction

I. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) 391 “Young Goodman Brown” 392 “The Minister’s Black Veil” 404 “The Birthmark” 415 Critical Perspectives on Hawthorne 428 Richard Harter Fogle, “Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the

Dark” 428 James R. Mellow, On “Young Goodman Brown” 431 Nancy Bunge, On “The Minister’s Black Veil” 432 Judith Fetterley, From “Women Beware Science:

‘The Birthmark’ ” 434

II. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) 437 “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” 438 “Good Country People” 451 “Revelation” 468 Critical Perspectives on O’Connor 486 Flannery O’Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable” 486 Flannery O’Connor, “Letter to a Professor of English” 489 Madison Jones, From “A Good Man’s Predicament” 490 Sarah Gordon, On “Good Country People” 494 Dorothy Walters, On “Revelation” 497

III. Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) 500 “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 502 “Life After High School” 516 “The Scarf” 530 Critical Perspectives on Oates 536 Joyce Carol Oates, From “Stories That Define Me: The Making of a

Writer” 536 Joyce Carol Oates, “’Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’

and “Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film” 537 Elaine Showalter, On “Where Are You Going, Where Have You

Been?” 541 Greg Johnson, On “Life After High School” and “The Scarf” 543

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Introduction

By offering three stories each by three major authors of literary short fiction, we hope to demonstrate the diversity of the genre and to provide you with the opportunity to study these writers in depth. In this edition, all the chosen writers are Americans, which seems appro- priate enough since the short story has been a distinctively American form since its inception. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates— exemplars of pioneering nineteenth-century work, of mid-twentieth-century modernist achievement, and of contemporary range and versatility, respectively—are acknowledged masters who have produced classic examples of the form and have exerted considerable influ- ence on other practitioners as well.

The three stories by each author have been chosen according to two primary criteria: the selections are among each author’s best work, and as a group they illustrate a notable variety in each writer’s handling of such fictional elements as plot, characterization, point of view, and theme.

In addition to the stories there is a brief introduction and a selection of literary criticism for each author. This material supplies an interpretive context to guide your critical thinking as you read and reread the stories; it should also help focus your preparation for class discussion and assist you with your writing assignments.

I. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) Nathaniel Hawthorne, like his contemporaries Herman Melville and

Edgar Allan Poe, was one of the American pioneers of the short story. Although best known for his later novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne launched his career as a short-story practitioner, his most celebrated collections being Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). His work was praised by such nineteenth-century luminaries as Melville, with whom he formed an intense friendship; Poe, usually a harsh critic who nonetheless praised Hawthorne’s prose style as “purity itself”; and Henry James, who lauded Hawthorne’s profound understanding of human psychology.

Hawthorne had originally been born with the name “Hathorne,” but presumably added the “w” because one of his ancestors named Hathorne had presided cruelly and remorselessly as a judge in the Salem witch trials.

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Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he attended Bowdoin College, worked at a Custom House, and married Sophia Peabody in 1842. This happy mar- riage helped provide the emotional stability required by the author’s dark, brooding temperament.

Hawthorne’s name is most frequently associated with his use of the liter- ary form known as “allegory,” but as James and many others since have noted, his allegorical fiction was enriched by his careful use of setting, his under- standing of his Puritan heritage, and his complex psychological themes.

Beginning with Fanshawe (1828), a novel published when he was only age twenty-four and later disavowed by the author, he was a productive writer of novels (The Scarlet Letter was both a critical and financial success) and of ten collections of stories. Three of his best—“Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and “The Birthmark”—are presented here.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Young Goodman Brown Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street of 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 tonight. 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 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, dost 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.”

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN First published in 1835. “Goodman” was a title of respect, but at a social rank lower than “gentleman.” “Goody” (or “Goodwife”) was the feminine equivalent. Deacon Gookin in the story is a historical personage (1612–1687), as are also Goody Cloyse, Goody Cory, and Martha Carrier, all three executed at the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was one of the pioneers of the short story. Hawthorne’s name is most frequently associated with his use of the literary form known as “allegory,” but as many critics have noted, his allegorical fiction was enriched by his careful use of setting, his understanding of his Puritan heritage, and his complex psychological themes.

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“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-house, 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 tonight. But no, no! ’twould 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 for- est, 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 traveler knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead, so that with lonely footsteps he may 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 look- ing forward again beheld the figure of a man in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He rose 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 awhile,” 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 traveler 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

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full fifteen minutes agone: The distance from the center of Boston to the forest was over twenty miles.

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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 would not have felt abashed at the gov- ernor’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-traveler, “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 inter- rupting 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 sayest,” 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 traveler with twisted staff, “I have a general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me, the selectmen of divers towns

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King William’s court: William III, King of England, 1689–1702 wot’st: knowest King Philip’s war: a war between the colonists and Indians, 1675–1676

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 traveler 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, consid- erably 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-traveler. “Betake you to 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 traveler 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 traveler,

confronting her and leaning on his writhing stick.

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Great and General Court: the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony

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“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,o 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 cinque-foil 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 tonight. 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.o 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 his fellow-traveler 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 traveler 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 sud- denly, 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?”

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gossip: familiar acquaintance Egyptian Magi: Pharaoh’s sorcerers, whose staffs became serpents when thrown to the ground (Exodus 7:10–12)

“You will think better of this by and by,” said his acquaintance com- posedly. “Sit here and rest yourself awhile, 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 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 travelers 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 tonight’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 nor solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could these holy

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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 over-burthened 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, hur- ried 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 townspeople 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 at 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 bewil- dered 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

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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 traveler, 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 meeting-house. 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

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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 moth- ers 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 reverend 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 unconverted 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 apparition 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 loath- ful 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 beck- oned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke-wreath, while a woman with dim features of despair threw out her hand to warn him

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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 widow’s 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 father’s wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet ones!—have dug little graves in the garden 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, bedchamber, 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 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 happi- ness. Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race!”

“Welcome!” repeated the fiend-worshippers in one cry of despair and triumph.

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And there they stood, the only pair as it seemed who were yet hesitat- ing 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 doth 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 meeting-house, 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

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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 grand- children, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. What does Hawthorne gain by including the names of actual persons (Goody Cloyse, Goody Cory, Deacon Gookin, Martha Carrier) and places (Salem village, Boston, Old South Church)? What religion is practiced by the townspeople?

2. What is the point of view? Where does it change, and what is the result of the change?

3. What allegorical meanings may be given to Goodman Brown? His wife? The for- est? Night (as opposed to day)? Brown’s journey?

4. What is Brown’s motive for going into the forest? What results does he expect from his journey? What does he expect the rest of his life to be like?

5. After he keeps his appointment with the traveler in the forest, Brown announces that he plans to return home. Why does he not do so immediately, and why at each stage when he renews his intention to do so does he proceed deeper into the forest? Is there any reason to suppose he does not actually see and hear what he thinks he perceives?

6. What details of the “witch-meeting” parallel those of a church communion ser- vice? Why does the congregation include “grave, reputable, and pious people” as well as known sinners (paragraph 56)?

7. What prevents Goodman Brown from receiving baptism? What does the devil promise as the result of baptism? Is that what you usually suppose is the reward for selling your soul to the devil? Why is it an appropriate reward for Goodman Brown? Since he does not receive baptism, how do you account for his behavior when he returns to the village?

8. “Had Goodman Brown . . . only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (paragraph 71). How are we to answer this question? Point out other places where Hawthorne leaves the interpretation of the story ambiguous. How is such ambiguity related to the story’s theme?

9. Characterize the behavior of Faith and the other townspeople after Brown’s return to the village. Are Brown’s attitude and behavior thereafter the result of conviction or doubt? Is he completely misanthropic?

10. Does the story demonstrate the devil’s claim that “Evil is the nature of mankind” (paragraph 65)?

HAWTHORNE / YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 403

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404 FICTION / THREE FEATURED WRITERS

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

The Minister’s Black Veil A PARABLE

The sexton stood in the porch of Milford meeting-house, pulling lust- ily at the bell-rope. The old people of the village came stooping along the street. Children, with bright faces, tript merrily beside their parents, or mimicked a graver gait, in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty maidens, and fancied that the sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on week-days. When the throng had mostly streamed into the porch, the sexton began to toll the bell, keeping his eye on the Reverend Mr. Hooper’s door. The first glimpse of the clergyman’s figure was the signal for the bell to cease its summons.

“But what has good Parson Hooper got upon his face?” cried the sex- ton in astonishment.

All within hearing immediately turned about, and beheld the semblance of Mr. Hooper, pacing slowly his meditative way towards the meeting-house. With one accord they started, expressing more won- der than if some strange minister were coming to dust the cushions of Mr. Hooper’s pulpit.

“Are you sure it is our parson?” inquired Goodman Gray of the sexton. “Of a certainty it is good Mr. Hooper,” replied the sexton. “He was to

have exchanged pulpits with Parson Shute of Westbury; but Parson Shute sent to excuse himself yesterday, being to preach a funeral sermon.”

The cause of so much amazement may appear sufficiently slight. Mr. Hooper, a gentlemanly person of about thirty, though still a bachelor, was dressed with due clerical neatness, as if a careful wife had starched his band, and brushed the weekly dust from his Sunday’s garb. There was but one thing remarkable in his appearance. Swathed about his forehead, and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by his breath, Mr. Hooper had on a black veil. On a nearer view, it seemed to consist of two folds of crape,º which entirely concealed his features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, farther than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things. With this gloomy shade before him, good Mr. Hooper walked onward, at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat and looking on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly to those of his parishioners who still waited on the meeting-house steps. But so wonder-struck were they, that his greeting hardly met with a return.

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THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL First published in 1835. See the footnote to “Young Goodman Brown” (page 392) for more information on Hawthorne and his career. crape: crepe; a lightweight fabric; bands of crape were often worn as signs of mourning

“I can’t really feel as if good Mr. Hooper’s face was behind that piece of crape,” said the sexton.

“I don’t like it,” muttered an old woman, as she hobbled into the meeting-house. “He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face.”

“Our parson has gone mad!” cried Goodman Gray, following him across the threshold.

A rumor of some unaccountable phenomenon had preceded Mr. Hooper into the meeting-house, and set all the congregation astir. Few could refrain from twisting their heads towards the door; many stood upright, and turned directly about; while several little boys clambered upon the seats, and came down again with a terrible racket. There was a general bustle, a rustling of the women’s gowns and shuffling of the men’s feet, greatly at variance with that hushed repose which should attend the entrance of the minister. But Mr. Hooper appeared not to notice the per- turbation of his people. He entered with an almost noiseless step, bent his head mildly to the pews on each side, and bowed as he passed his oldest parishioner, a white-haired great-grandsire, who occupied an arm-chair in the centre of the aisle. It was strange to observe, how slowly this vener- able man became conscious of something singular in the appearance of his pastor. He seemed not fully to partake of the prevailing wonder, till Mr. Hooper had ascended the stairs, and showed himself in the pulpit, face to face with his congregation, except for the black veil. That mysterious emblem was never once withdrawn. It shook with his measured breath as he gave out the psalm; it threw its obscurity between him and the holy page, as he read the Scriptures; and while he prayed, the veil lay heavily on his uplifted countenance. Did he seek to hide it from the dread Being whom he was addressing?

Such was the effect of this simple piece of crape, that more than one woman of delicate nerves was forced to leave the meeting-house. Yet per- haps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the min- ister, as his black veil to them.

Mr. Hooper had the reputation of a good preacher, but not an energetic one: he strove to win his people heavenward, by mild persuasive influ- ences, rather than to drive them thither, by the thunders of the Word. The sermon which he now delivered, was marked by the same characteristics of style and manner, as the general series of his pulpit oratory. But there was something, either in the sentiment of the discourse itself, or in the imagination of the auditors, which made it greatly the most powerful effort that they had ever heard from their pastor’s lips. It was tinged, rather more darkly than usual, with the gentle gloom of Mr. Hooper’s temperament. The subject had reference to secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we

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hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them. A subtle power was breathed into his words. Each member of the congrega- tion, the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought. Many spread their clasped hands on their bosoms. There was nothing terrible in what Mr. Hooper said; at least, no violence; and yet, with every tremor of his melancholy voice, the hear- ers quaked. An unsought pathos came hand in hand with awe. So sensible were the audience of some unwonted attribute in their minister, that they longed for a breath of wind to blow aside the veil, almost believing that a stranger’s visage would be discovered, though the form, gesture, and voice were those of Mr. Hooper.

At the close of the services, the people hurried out with indecorous confusion, eager to communicate their pent-up amazement, and conscious of lighter spirits, the moment they lost sight of the black veil. Some gathered in little circles, huddled closely together, with their mouths all whispering in the centre; some went homeward alone, wrapt in silent meditation; some talked loudly, and profaned the Sabbath-day with osten- tatious laughter. A few shook their sagacious heads, intimating that they could penetrate the mystery; while one or two affirmed that there was no mystery at all, but only that Mr. Hooper’s eyes were so weakened by the midnight lamp, as to require a shade. After a brief interval, forth came good Mr. Hooper also, in the rear of his flock. Turning his veiled face from one group to another, he paid due reverence to the hoary heads, saluted the middle-aged with kind dignity, as their friend and spiritual guide, greeted the young with mingled authority and love, and laid his hands on the little children’s heads to bless them. Such was always his custom on the Sabbath- day. Strange and bewildered looks repaid him for his courtesy. None, as on former occasions, aspired to the honor of walking by their pastor’s side. Old Squire Saunders, doubtless by an accidental lapse of memory, neglected to invite Mr. Hooper to his table, where the good clergyman had been wont to bless the food, almost every Sunday since his settlement. He returned, therefore, to the parsonage, and, at the moment of closing the door, was observed to look back upon the people, all of whom had their eyes fixed upon the minister. A sad smile gleamed faintly from beneath the black veil, and flickered about his mouth, glimmering as he disappeared.

“How strange,” said a lady, “that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper’s face!”

“Something must surely be amiss with Mr. Hooper’s intellects,” observed her husband, the physician of the village. “But the strangest part

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of the affair is the effect of this vagary, even on a sober-minded man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our pastor’s face, throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghost-like from head to foot. Do you not feel it so?”

“Truly do I,” replied the lady, “and I would not be alone with him for the world. I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself!”

“Men sometimes are so,” said her husband. The afternoon service was attended with similar circumstances. At its

conclusion, the bell tolled for the funeral of a young lady. The relatives and friends were assembled in the house, and the more distant acquaintances stood about the door, speaking of the good qualities of the deceased, when their talk was interrupted by the appearance of Mr. Hooper, still covered with his black veil. It was now an appropriate emblem. The clergyman stepped into the room where the corpse was laid, and bent over the cof- fin, to take a last farewell of his deceased parishioner. As he stooped, the veil hung straight down from his forehead, so that, if her eye-lids had not been closed for ever, the dead maiden might have seen his face. Could Mr. Hooper be fearful of her glance, that he so hastily caught back the black veil? A person, who watched the interview between the dead and living, scrupled not to affirm, that, at the instant when the clergyman’s features were disclosed, the corpse had slightly shuddered, rustling the shroud and muslin cap, though the countenance retained the composure of death. A superstitious old woman was the only witness of this prodigy. From the coffin, Mr. Hooper passed into the chamber of the mourners, and thence to the head of the staircase, to make the funeral prayer. It was a tender and heart-dissolving prayer, full of sorrow, yet so imbued with celestial hopes, that the music of a heavenly harp, swept by the fingers of the dead, seemed faintly to be heard among the saddest accents of the minister. The people trembled, though they but darkly understood him, when he prayed that they, and himself, and all of mortal race, might be ready, as he trusted this young maiden had been, for the dreadful hour that should snatch the veil from their faces. The bearers went heavily forth, and the mourners fol- lowed, saddening all the street, with the dead before them, and Mr. Hooper in his black veil behind.

“Why do you look back?” said one in the procession to his partner. “I had a fancy,” replied she, “that the minister and the maiden’s spirit

were walking hand in hand.” “And so had I, at the same moment,” said the other. That night, the handsomest couple in Milford village were to be

joined in wedlock. Though reckoned a melancholy man, Mr. Hooper had a placid cheerfulness for such occasions, which often excited a sympathetic smile, where livelier merriment would have been thrown away. There was

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no quality of his disposition which made him more beloved than this. The company at the wedding awaited his arrival with impatience trusting that the strange awe, which had gathered over him throughout the day, would now be dispelled. But such was not the result. When Mr. Hooper came, the first thing that their eyes rested on was the same horrible black veil, which had added deeper gloom to the funeral, and could portend noth- ing but evil to the wedding. Such was its immediate effect on the guests, that a cloud seemed to have rolled duskily from beneath the black crape, and dimmed the light of the candles. The bridal pair stood up before the minister. But the bride’s cold fingers quivered in the tremulous hand of the bridegroom, and her death-like paleness caused a whisper, that the maiden who had been buried a few hours before, was come from her grave to be married. If ever another wedding were so dismal, it was that famous one, where they tolled the wedding-knell. After performing the ceremony, Mr. Hooper raised a glass of wine to his lips, wishing happiness to the new- married couple, in a strain of mild pleasantry that ought to have bright- ened the features of the guests, like a cheerful gleam from the hearth. At that instant, catching a glimpse of his figure in the looking-glass, the black veil involved his own spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed all others. His frame shuddered—his lips grew white—he spilt the untasted wine upon the carpet—and rushed forth into the darkness. For the Earth, too, had on her Black Veil.

The next day, the whole village of Milford talked of little else than Parson Hooper’s black veil. That, and the mystery concealed behind it, supplied a topic for discussion between acquaintances meeting in the street, and good women gossiping at their open windows. It was the first item of news that the tavern-keeper told to his guests. The children bab- bled of it on their way to school. One imitative little imp covered his face with an old black handkerchief, thereby so affrighting his playmates, that the panic seized himself, and he well nigh lost his wits by his own waggery.

It was remarkable, that, of all the busy-bodies and impertinent people in the parish, not one ventured to put the plain question to Mr. Hooper, wherefore he did this thing. Hitherto, whenever there appeared the slight- est call for such interference, he had never lacked advisers, nor shown himself averse to be guided by their judgment. If he erred at all, it was by so painful a degree of self-distrust, that even the mildest censure would lead him to consider an indifferent action as a crime. Yet, though so well acquainted with this amiable weakness, no individual among his parishion- ers chose to make the black veil a subject of friendly remonstrance. There was a feeling of dread, neither plainly confessed nor carefully concealed, which caused each to shift the responsibility upon another, till at length it was found expedient to send a deputation of the church, in order to deal

with Mr. Hooper about the mystery, before it should grow into a scandal. Never did an embassy so ill discharge its duties. The minister received them with friendly courtesy, but became silent, after they were seated, leaving to his visitors the whole burthen of introducing their important business. The topic, it might be supposed, was obvious enough. There was the black veil, swathed round Mr. Hooper’s forehead, and conceal- ing every feature above his placid mouth, on which, at times, they could perceive the glimmering of a melancholy smile. But that piece of crape, to their imagination, seemed to hang down before his heart, the symbol of a fearful secret between him and them. Were the veil but cast aside, they might speak freely of it, but not till then. Thus they sat a considerable time, speechless, confused, and shrinking uneasily from Mr. Hooper’s eye, which they felt to be fixed upon them with an invisible glance. Finally, the deputies returned abashed to their constituents, pronouncing the matter too weighty to be handled, except by a council of the churches, if, indeed, it might not require a general synod.º

But there was one person in the village, unappalled by the awe with which the black veil had impressed all beside herself. When the deputies returned without an explanation, or even venturing to demand one, she, with the calm energy of her character, determined to chase away the strange cloud that appeared to be settling round Mr. Hooper, every moment more darkly than before. As his plighted wife, it should be her privilege to know what the black veil concealed. At the minister’s first visit, therefore, she entered upon the subject, with a direct simplicity, which made the task easier both for him and her. After he had seated himself, she fixed her eyes steadfastly upon the veil, but could discern nothing of the dreadful gloom that had so overawed the multitude: it was but a double fold of crape, hanging down from his forehead to his mouth, and slightly stirring with his breath.

“No,” said she aloud, and smiling, “there is nothing terrible in this piece of crape, except that it hides a face which I am always glad to look upon. Come, good sir, let the sun shine from behind the cloud. First lay aside your black veil: then tell me why you put it on.”

Mr. Hooper’s smile glimmered faintly. “There is an hour to come,” said he, “when all of us shall cast aside

our veils. Take it not amiss, beloved friend, if I wear this piece of crape till then.”

“Your words are a mystery too,” returned the young lady. “Take away the veil from them, at least.”

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“Elizabeth, I will,” said he, “so far as my vow may suffer me. Know, then, this veil is a type and a symbol, and I am bound to wear it ever, both in light and darkness, in solitude and before the gaze of multitudes, and as with strangers, so with my familiar friends. No mortal eye will see it withdrawn. This dismal shade must separate me from the world: even you, Elizabeth, can never come behind it!”

“What grievous affliction hath befallen you,” she earnestly inquired, “that you should thus darken your eyes for ever?”

“If it be a sign of mourning,” replied Mr. Hooper, “I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil.”

“But what if the world will not believe that it is the type of an inno- cent sorrow?” urged Elizabeth. “Beloved and respected as you are, there may be whispers, that you hide your face under the consciousness of secret sin. For the sake of your holy office, do away this scandal!”

The color rose into her cheeks, as she intimated the nature of the rumors that were already abroad in the village. But Mr. Hooper’s mildness did not forsake him. He even smiled again—that same sad smile, which always appeared like a faint glimmering of light, proceeding from the obscurity beneath the veil.

“If I hide my face for sorrow, there is cause enough,” he merely replied; “and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do the same?”

And with this gentle, but unconquerable obstinacy, did he resist all her entreaties. At length Elizabeth sat silent. For a few moments she appeared lost in thought, considering, probably, what new methods might be tried, to withdraw her lover from so dark a fantasy, which, if it had no other meaning, was perhaps a symptom of mental disease. Though of a firmer character than his own, the tears rolled down her cheeks. But, in an instant, as it were, a new feeling took the place of sorrow: her eyes were fixed insensibly on the black veil, when, like a sudden twilight in the air, its terrors fell around her. She arose, and stood trembling before him.

“And do you feel it then at last?” said he mournfully. She made no reply, but covered her eyes with her hand, and turned to

leave the room. He rushed forward and caught her arm. “Have patience with me, Elizabeth!” cried he passionately. “Do not

desert me, though this veil must be between us here on earth. Be mine, and hereafter there shall be no veil over my face, no darkness between our souls! It is but a mortal veil—it is not for eternity! Oh! you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil. Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity for ever!”

“Lift the veil but once, and look me in the face,” said she. “Never! It cannot be!” replied Mr. Hooper.

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“Then, farewell!” said Elizabeth. She withdrew her arm from his grasp, and slowly departed, pausing

at the door, to give one long, shuddering gaze, that seemed almost to pen- etrate the mystery of the black veil. But, even amid his grief, Mr. Hooper smiled to think that only a material emblem had separated him from hap- piness, though the horrors which it shadowed forth, must be drawn darkly between the fondest of lovers.

From that time no attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper’s black veil, or, by a direct appeal, to discover the secret which it was supposed to hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice, it was reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the sober actions of men otherwise rational, and tinges them all with its own sem- blance of insanity. But with the multitude, good Mr. Hooper was irrepa- rably a bugbear. He could not walk the street with any peace of mind, so conscious was he that the gentle and timid would turn aside to avoid him, and that others would make it a point of hardihood to throw themselves in his way. The impertinence of the latter class compelled him to give up his customary walk, at sunset, to the burial ground; for when he leaned pensively over the gate, there would always be faces behind the grave- stones, peeping at his black veil. A fable went the rounds, that the stare of the dead people drove him thence. It grieved him, to the very depth of his kind heart, to observe how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest sports, while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive dread caused him to feel, more strongly than aught else, that a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so great, that he never willingly passed before a mirror, nor stooped to drink at a still foun- tain, lest, in its peaceful bosom, he should be affrighted by himself. This was what gave plausibility to the whispers, that Mr. Hooper’s conscience tortured him for some great crime, too horrible to be entirely concealed, or otherwise than so obscurely intimated. Thus, from beneath the black veil, there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. It was said, that ghost and fiend consorted with him there. With self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium that sad- dened the whole world. Even the lawless wind, it was believed, respected his dreadful secret, and never blew aside the veil. But still good Mr. Hooper sadly smiled, at the pale visages of the worldly throng as he passed by.

Among all its bad influences, the black veil had the one desirable effect, of making its wearer a very efficient clergyman. By the aid of his mysterious emblem—for there was no other apparent cause—he became

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a man of awful power, over souls that were in agony for sin. His converts always regarded him with a dread peculiar to themselves, affirming, though but figuratively, that, before he brought them to celestial light, they had been with him behind the black veil. Its gloom, indeed, enabled him to sympathize with all dark affections. Dying sinners cried aloud for Mr. Hooper, and would not yield their breath till he appeared; though ever, as he stooped to whisper consolation, they shuddered at the veiled face so near their own. Such were the terrors of the black veil, even when death had bared his visage! Strangers came long distances to attend service at his church, with the mere idle purpose of gazing at his figure, because it was forbidden them to behold his face. But many were made to quake ere they departed! Once, during Governor Belcher’s administration, Mr. Hooper was appointed to preach the election sermon. Covered with his black veil, he stood before the chief magistrate, the council, and the representatives, and wrought so deep an impression, that the legislative measures of that year, were characterized by all the gloom and piety of our earliest ancestral sway.

In this manner Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish. As years wore on, shed- ding their snows above his sable veil, he acquired a name throughout the New England churches, and they called him Father Hooper. Nearly all his parishioners, who were of mature age when he was settled, had been borne away by many a funeral: he had one congregation in the church, and a more crowded one in the church-yard; and having wrought so late into the evening, and done his work so well, it was now good Father Hooper’s turn to rest.

Several persons were visible by the shaded candlelight, in the death- chamber of the old clergyman. Natural connexions he had none. But there was the decorously grave, though unmoved physician, seeking only to mitigate the last pangs of the patient whom he could not save. There were the deacons, and other eminently pious members of his church. There, also, was the Reverend Mr. Clark, of Westbury, a young and zealous divine, who had ridden in haste to pray by the bed-side of the expiring minister. There was the nurse, no hired handmaiden of death, but one whose calm affection had endured thus long, in secrecy, in solitude, amid the chill of age, and would not perish, even at the dying hour. Who, but Elizabeth! And there lay the hoary head of good Father Hooper upon the death-pillow, with the black veil still swathed about his brow and reaching down over his face, so that each more difficult gasp of his faint breath caused it to stir. All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world: it

had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman’s love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and still it lay upon his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity.

For some time previous, his mind had been confused, wavering doubt- fully between the past and the present, and hovering forward, as it were, at intervals, into the indistinctness of the world to come. There had been feverish turns, which tossed him from side to side, and wore away what little strength he had. But in his most convulsive struggles, and in the wildest vagaries of his intellect, when no other thought retained its sober influence, he still showed an awful solicitude lest the black veil should slip aside. Even if his bewildered soul could have forgotten, there was a faithful woman at his pillow, who, with averted eyes, would have covered that aged face, which she had last beheld in the comeliness of manhood. At length the death-stricken old man lay quietly in the torpor of mental and bodily exhaustion, with an imperceptible pulse, and breath that grew fainter and fainter, except when a long, deep, and irregular inspiration seemed to pre- lude the flight of his spirit.

The minister of Westbury approached the bedside. “Venerable Father Hooper,” said he, “the moment of your release is

at hand. Are you ready for the lifting of the veil, that shuts in time from eternity?”

Father Hooper at first replied merely by a feeble motion of his hand; then, apprehensive, perhaps, that his meaning might be doubtful, he exerted himself to speak.

“Yea,” said he, in faint accents, “my soul hath a patient weariness until that veil be lifted.”

“And is it fitting,” resumed the Reverend Mr. Clark, “that a man so given to prayer, of such a blameless example, holy in deed and thought, so far as mortal judgment may pronounce; is it fitting that a father in the church should leave a shadow on his memory, that may seem to blacken a life so pure? I pray you, my venerable brother, let not this thing be! Suffer us to be gladdened by your triumphant aspect, as you go to your reward. Before the veil of eternity be lifted, let me cast aside this black veil from your face!”

And thus speaking, the Reverend Mr. Clark bent forward to reveal the mystery of so many years. But, exerting a sudden energy, that made all the beholders stand aghast, Father Hooper snatched both his hands from beneath the bed-clothes, and pressed them strongly on the black veil, reso- lute to struggle, if the minister of Westbury would contend with a dying man.

“Never!” cried the veiled clergyman. “On earth, never!”

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“Dark old man!” exclaimed the affrighted minister, “with what hor- rible crime upon your soul are you now passing to the judgment?”

Father Hooper’s breath heaved; it rattled in his throat; but, with a mighty effort, grasping forward with his hands, he caught hold of life, and held it back till he should speak. He even raised himself in bed; and there he sat, shivering with the arms of death around him, while the black veil hung down, awful, at that last moment, in the gathered terrors of a life- time. And yet the faint, sad smile, so often there, now seemed to glimmer from its obscurity, and linger on Father Hooper’s lips.

“Why do you tremble at me alone?” cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. “Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!”

While his auditors shrank from one another, in mutual affright, Father Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse, with a faint smile lin- gering on the lips. Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave. The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper’s face is dust; but awful is still the thought, that it mouldered beneath the Black Veil!

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Look up the term “allegory” in the glossary of this book, and read further about allegory on the Internet. Is “The Minister’s Black Veil” an allegorical work? Why or why not?

2. Why does the minister wear the black veil over his face? Find evidence in the text to support your answer.

3. How do the townspeople react to the minister’s wearing the veil? Is the minister himself more sympathetic to the reader, or are the townspeople more sympa- thetic?

4. Define the term “parable.” What specific connotations does the word have? Why does Hawthorne label this story a “parable”?

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

The Birthmark In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an

eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace-smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days, when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their conge- nial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

“Georgiana,” said he, “has it never occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?”

“No, indeed,” said she, smiling; but, perceiving the seriousness of his manner, she blushed deeply. “To tell you the truth, it has been so often called a charm, that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so.”

“Ah, upon another face perhaps it might,” replied her husband; “but never on yours. No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature, that this slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection.”

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THE BIRTHMARK. First published in 1843. See the footnote to “Young Goodman Brown” (page 392) for more information on Hawthorne and his career.

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“Shocks you, my husband!” cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first red- dening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. “Then why did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks you!”

To explain this conversation, it must be mentioned that in the centre of Georgiana’s left cheek there was a singular mark, deeply interwoven, as it were, with the texture and substance of her face. In the usual state of her complexion—a healthy though delicate bloom—the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surround- ing rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birth-hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign-manual varied exceedingly according to the difference of temperament in the beholders. Some fastidi- ous persons—but they were exclusively of her own sex—affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Geor- giana’s beauty and rendered her countenance even hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say that one of those small blue stains which sometimes occur in the purest statuary marble would convert the Eve of Powersº to a monster. Masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the sem- blance of a flaw. After his marriage,—for he thought little or nothing of the matter before,—Aylmer discovered that this was the case with himself.

Had she been less beautiful,—if Envy’s self could have found aught else to sneer at,—he might have felt his affection heightened by the pret- tiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart; but, seeing her otherwise so perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by

Eve of Powers: Eve Tempted, a marble statue by sculptor Hiram Powers (1805–1873)

toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer’s sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given him delight.

At all the seasons which should have been their happiest he invari- ably, and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose to the contrary, reverted to this one disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first appeared, it so connected itself with innumerable trains of thought and modes of feeling that it became the central point of all. With the morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face and recognized the symbol of imperfec- tion; and when they sat together at the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood- fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her cheek into a death-like paleness, amid which the crimson hand was brought strongly out, like a bas-relief of ruby on the whitest marble.

Late one night, when the lights were growing dim so as hardly to betray the stain on the poor wife’s cheek, she herself, for the first time, voluntarily took up the subject.

“Do you remember, my dear Aylmer,” said she, with a feeble attempt at a smile, “have you any recollection, of a dream last night about this odi- ous hand?”

“None! none whatever!” replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added, in a dry, cold tone, affected for the sake of concealing the real depth of his emotion, “I might well dream of it; for, before I fell asleep, it had taken a pretty firm hold of my fancy.”

“And you did dream of it?” continued Georgiana, hastily; for she dreaded lest a gush of tears should interrupt what she had to say. “A ter- rible dream! I wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible to forget this one expression?—‘It is in her heart now; we must have it out!’ Reflect, my husband; for by all means I would have you recall that dream.”

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot con- fine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream. He had fancied him- self with his servant Aminadab attempting an operation for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank the hand,

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until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.

When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in his wife’s presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising direct- ness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had not been aware of the tyran- nizing influence acquired by one idea over his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his heart to go for the sake of giving himself peace.

“Aylmer,” resumed Georgiana, solemnly, “I know not what may be the cost to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as life itself. Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid upon me before I came into the world?”

“Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought upon the subject,” hastily interrupted Aylmer. “I am convinced of the perfect practicability of its removal.”

“If there be the remotest possibility of it,” continued Georgiana, “let the attempt be made, at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust,— life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep science. All the world bears witness of it. You have achieved great wonders. Cannot you remove this little, little mark, which I cover with the tips of two small fingers? Is this beyond your power, for the sake of your own peace, and to save your poor wife from madness?”

“Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife,” cried Aylmer, rapturously, “doubt not my power. I have already given this matter the deepest thought,— thought which might almost have enlightened me to create a being less perfect than yourself. Georgiana, you have led me deeper than ever into the heart of science. I feel myself fully competent to render this dear cheek as faultless as its fellow; and then, most beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what Nature left imperfect in her fairest work! Even Pygmalion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will be.”

“It is resolved, then,” said Georgiana, faintly smiling. “And, Aylmer, spare me not, though you should find the birthmark take refuge in my heart at last.”

Her husband tenderly kissed her cheek, —her right cheek, —not that which bore the impress of the crimson hand.

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The next day Aylmer apprised his wife of a plan that he had formed whereby he might have opportunity for the intense thought and constant watchfulness which the proposed operation would require; while Geor- giana, likewise, would enjoy the perfect repose essential to its success. They were to seclude themselves in the extensive apartments occupied by Aylmer as a laboratory, and where, during his toilsome youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of nature that had roused the admira- tion of all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in this laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest cloud- region and of the profoundest mines; he had satisfied himself of the causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano; and had explained the mystery of fountains, and how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure, and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth. Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the wonders of the human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling recognition of the truth—against which all seekers sooner or later stumble—that our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten investigations; not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them; but because they involved much physiological truth and lay in the path of his proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana.

As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory Georgiana was cold and tremulous. Aylmer looked cheerfully into her face, with intent to reas- sure her, but was so startled with the intense glow of the birthmark upon the whiteness of her cheek that he could not restrain a strong convulsive shudder. His wife fainted.

“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor.

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer’s underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he executed all the details of his master’s experiments. With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted him, he

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seemed to represent man’s physical nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.

“Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab,” said Aylmer, “and burn a pastil.”º

“Yes, master,” answered Aminadab, looking intently at the lifeless form of Georgiana; and then he muttered to himself, “If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birthmark.”

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her death-like faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combina- tion of grandeur and grace that no other species of adornment can achieve; and, as they fell from the ceiling to the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds. And Aylmer, excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered with his chemical processes, had supplied its place with perfumed lamps, emitting flames of various hue, but all uniting in a soft, impurpled radi- ance. He now knelt by his wife’s side, watching her earnestly, but without alarm; for he was confident in his science, and felt that he could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might intrude.

“Where am I? Ah, I remember,” said Georgiana, faintly; and she placed her hand over her cheek to hide the terrible mark from her husband’s eyes.

“Fear not, dearest!” exclaimed he. “Do not shrink from me! Believe me, Georgiana, I even rejoice in this single imperfection, since it will be such a rapture to remove it.”

“O, spare me!” sadly replied his wife. “Pray do not look at it again. I never can forget that convulsive shudder.”

In order to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth from her seclusion,

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pastil: stick or cone of an aromatic substance burned for its scent

immediately, as if her thoughts were answered, the procession of external existence flitted across a screen. The scenery and the figures of actual life were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching yet indescribable dif- ference which always makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more attractive than the original. When wearied of this, Aylmer bade her cast her eyes upon a vessel containing a quantity of earth. She did so, with little interest at first; but was soon startled to perceive the germ of a plant shoot- ing upward from the soil. Then came the slender stalk; the leaves gradually unfolded themselves; and amid them was a perfect and lovely flower.

“It is magical!” cried Georgiana. “I dare not touch it.” “Nay, pluck it,” answered Aylmer, —“pluck it, and inhale its brief

perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed-vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself.”

But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of fire.

“There was too powerful a stimulus,” said Aylmer, thoughtfully. To make up for this abortive experiment, he proposed to take her por-

trait by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be effected by rays of light striking upon a polished plate of metal. Georgiana assented; but, on looking at the result, was affrighted to find the features of the por- trait blurred and indefinable; while the minute figure of a hand appeared where the cheek should have been. Aylmer snatched the metallic plate and threw it into a jar of corrosive acid.

Soon, however, he forgot these mortifying failures. In the intervals of study and chemical experiment he came to her flushed and exhausted, but seemed invigorated by her presence, and spoke in glowing language of the resources of his art. He gave a history of the long dynasty of the alchemists, who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and base. Aylmer appeared to believe that, by the plainest scientific logic, it was altogether within the limits of possibility to discover this long-sought medium. “But,” he added, “a philosopher who should go deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to stoop to the exercise of it.” Not less singular were his opinions in regard to the elixir vitæ. He more than intimated that it was at his option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps interminably; but that it would produce a discord in nature which all the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nos- trum, would find cause to curse.

“Aylmer, are you in earnest?” asked Georgiana, looking at him with amazement and fear. “It is terrible to possess such power, or even to dream of possessing it.”

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“O, do not tremble, my love,” said her husband. “I would not wrong either you or myself by working such inharmonious effects upon our lives; but I would have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is the skill requisite to remove this little hand.”

At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as usual, shrank as if a red-hot iron had touched her cheek.

Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She could hear his voice in the distant furnace-room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer reap- peared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of chemical products and natural treasures of the earth. Among the former he showed her a small vial, in which, he remarked, was contained a gentle yet most powerful fragrance, capable of impregnating all the breezes that blow across a kingdom. They were of inestimable value, the contents of that little vial; and, as he said so, he threw some of the perfume into the air and filled the room with piercing and invigorating delight.

“And what is this?” asked Georgiana, pointing to a small crystal globe containing a gold-colored liquid. “It is so beautiful to the eye that I could imagine it the elixir of life.”

“In one sense it is,” replied Aylmer; “or rather, the elixir of immortal- ity. It is the most precious poison that ever was concocted in this world. By its aid I could apportion the lifetime of any mortal at whom you might point your finger. The strength of the dose would determine whether he were to linger out years, or drop dead in the midst of a breath. No king on his guarded throne could keep his life if I, in my private station, should deem that the welfare of millions justified me in depriving him of it.”

“Why do you keep such a terrific drug?” inquired Georgiana, in horror. “Do not mistrust me, dearest,” said her husband, smiling; “its virtuous

potency is yet greater than its harmful one. But see! here is a powerful cos- metic. With a few drops of this in a vase of water, freckles may be washed away as easily as the hands are cleansed. A stronger infusion would take the blood out of the cheek, and leave the rosiest beauty a pale ghost.”

“Is it with this lotion that you intend to bathe my cheek?” asked Georgiana, anxiously.

“O no,” hastily replied her husband; “this is merely superficial. Your case demands a remedy that shall go deeper.”

In his interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally made minute inquiries as to her sensations, and whether the confinement of the rooms and the temperature of the atmosphere agreed with her. These questions had such a particular drift that Georgiana began to conjecture that she was already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed in

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with the fragrant air or taken with her food. She fancied likewise, but it might be altogether fancy, that there was a stirring up of her system, —a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her veins, and tingling, half painfully, half pleasurably, at her heart. Still, whenever she dared to look into the mirror, there she beheld herself pale as a white rose and with the crimson birthmark stamped upon her cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so much as she.

To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it neces- sary to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana turned over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old tomes she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the works of the philosophers of the Middle Ages, such as Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined themselves, to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world. Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods whereby wonders might be wrought.

But, to Georgiana, the most engrossing volume was a large folio from her husbands own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of his scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances to which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiri- tualized them all, and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly than ever, but with a less entire dependence on his judgment than heretofore. Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe that his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if compared with the ideal at which he aimed. His brightest diamonds were the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume, rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as melan- choly a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by

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the earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius, in whatever sphere, might recognize the image of his own experience in Aylmer’s journal.

So deeply did these reflections affect Georgiana that she laid her face upon the open volume and burst into tears. In this situation she was found by her husband.

“It is dangerous to read in a sorcerer’s books,” said he with a smile, though his countenance was uneasy and displeased. “Georgiana, there are pages in that volume which I can scarcely glance over and keep my senses. Take heed lest it prove as detrimental to you.”

“It has made me worship you more than ever,” said she. “Ah, wait for this one success,” rejoined he, “then worship me if you

will. I shall deem myself hardly unworthy of it. But come, I have sought you for the luxury of your voice. Sing to me, dearest.”

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit. He then took his leave with a boyish exuberance of gayety, assur- ing her that her seclusion would endure but a little longer, and that the result was already certain. Scarcely had he departed when Georgiana felt irresistibly impelled to follow him. She had forgotten to inform Aylmer of a symptom which for two or three hours past had begun to excite her attention. It was a sensation in the fatal birthmark, not painful, but which induced a restlessness throughout her system. Hastening after her husband, she intruded for the first time into the laboratory.

The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and fever- ish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a distilling-apparatus in full operation. Around the room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use. The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The severe and homely simplicity of the apart- ment, with its naked walls and brick pavement, looked strange, accus- tomed as Georgiana had become to the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was the aspect of Aylmer himself.

He was pale as death, anxious and absorbed, and hung over the furnace as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness whether the liquid which it was distilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or misery. How different from the sanguine and joyous mien that he had assumed for Georgiana’s encouragement!

“Carefully now, Aminadab; carefully, thou human machine; carefully, thou man of clay,” muttered Aylmer, more to himself than his assistant. “Now, if there be a thought too much or too little, it is all over.”

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“Ho! ho!” mumbled Aminadab. “Look, master! look!” Aylmer raised his eyes hastily, and at first reddened, then grew paler

than ever, on beholding Georgiana. He rushed towards her and seized her arm with a grip that left the print of his fingers upon it.

“Why do you come hither? Have you no trust in your husband?” cried he, impetuously. “Would you throw the blight of that fatal birthmark over my labors? It is not well done. Go, prying woman! go!”

“Nay, Aylmer,” said Georgiana with the firmness of which she pos- sessed no stinted endowment, “it is not you that have a right to complain. You mistrust your wife; you have concealed the anxiety with which you watch the development of this experiment. Think not so unworthily of me, my husband. Tell me all the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink; for my share in it is far less than your own.”

“No, no, Georgiana!” said Aylmer, impatiently; “it must not be.” “I submit,” replied she, calmly. “And, Aylmer, I shall quaff whatever

draught you bring me; but it will be on the same principle that would induce me to take a dose of poison if offered by your hand.”

“My noble wife,” said Aylmer, deeply moved, “I knew not the height and depth of your nature until now. Nothing shall be concealed. Know, then, that this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched its grasp into your being with a strength of which I had no previous conception. I have already administered agents powerful enough to do aught except to change your entire physical system. Only one thing remains to be tried. If that fail us we are ruined.”

“Why did you hesitate to tell me this?” asked she. “Because, Georgiana,” said Aylmer, in a low voice, “there is danger.” “Danger? There is but one danger, —that this horrible stigma shall be

left upon my cheek!” cried Georgiana. “Remove it, remove it, whatever be the cost, or we shall both go mad!”

“Heaven knows your words are too true,” said Aylmer, sadly. “And now, dearest, return to your boudoir. In a little while all will be tested.”

He conducted her back and took leave of her with a solemn tenderness which spoke far more than his words how much was now at stake. After his departure Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the character of Aylmer, and did it completer justice than at any previous moment. Her heart exulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love, —so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. She felt how much more precious was such a sentiment than that meaner kind which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake, and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual; and with her whole spirit she prayed that, for a single moment, she

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might satisfy his highest and deepest conception. Longer than one moment she well knew it could not be; for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant before.

The sound of her husbands footsteps aroused her. He bore a crystal goblet containing a liquor colorless as water, but bright enough to be the draught of immortality. Aylmer was pale; but it seemed rather the conse- quence of a highly wrought state of mind and tension of spirit than of fear or doubt.

“The concoction of the draught has been perfect,” said he, in answer to Georgiana’s look. “Unless all my science have deceived me, it cannot fail.”

“Save on your account, my dearest Aylmer,” observed his wife, “I might wish to put off this birthmark of mortality by relinquishing mor- tality itself in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself, me thinks I am of all mortals the most fit to die.”

“You are fit for heaven without tasting death!” replied her husband. “But why do we speak of dying? The draught cannot fail. Behold its effect upon this plant.”

On the window-seat there stood a geranium diseased with yellow blotches, which had overspread all its leaves. Aylmer poured a small quan- tity of the liquid upon the soil in which it grew. In a little time, when the roots of the plant had taken up the moisture, the unsightly blotches began to be extinguished in a living verdure.

“There needed no proof,” said Georgiana, quietly. “Give me the goblet. I joyfully stake all upon your word.”

“Drink, then, thou lofty creature!” exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid admiration. “There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy sensible frame, too, shall soon be all perfect.”

She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to his hand. “It is grateful,” said she, with a placid smile. “Methinks it is like water

from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of unobtrusive fragrance and deliciousness. It allays a feverish thirst that had parched me for many days. Now, dearest, let me sleep. My earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset.”

She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance, as if it required almost more energy than she could command to pronounce the faint and lingering syllables. Scarcely had they loitered through her lips ere she was lost in slumber. Aylmer sat by her side, watching her aspect with the emo- tions proper to a man, the whole value of whose existence was involved in the process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood, however, was

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the philosophic investigation characteristic of the man of science. Not the minutest symptom escaped him. A heightened flush of the cheek, a slight irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid, a hardly perceptible tremor through the frame, —such were the details which, as the moments passed, he wrote down in his folio volume. Intense thought had set its stamp upon every previous page of that volume; but the thoughts of years were all concentrated upon the last.

While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at the fatal hand, and not without a shudder. Yet once, by a strange and unaccountable impulse, he pressed it with his lips. His spirit recoiled, however, in the very act; and Georgiana, out of the midst of her deep sleep, moved uneasily and mur- mured, as if in remonstrance. Again Aylmer resumed his watch. Nor was it without avail. The crimson hand, which at first had been strongly vis- ible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek, now grew more faintly outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but the birthmark, with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat of its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow fading out of the sky, and you will know how that mysterious symbol passed away.

“By Heaven! it is well-nigh gone!” said Aylmer to himself, in almost irrepressible ecstasy. “I can scarcely trace it now. Success! success! And now it is like the faintest rose-color. The lightest flush of blood across her cheek would overcome it. But she is so pale!”

He drew aside the window-curtain and suffered the light of natural day to fall into the room and rest upon her cheek. At the same time he heard a gross, hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his servant Aminadab’s expression of delight.

“Ah, clod! ah, earthly mass!” cried Aylmer, laughing in a sort of frenzy, “you have served me well! Matter and spirit—earth and heaven—have both done their part in this! Laugh, thing of the senses! You have earned the right to laugh.”

These exclamations broke Georgiana’s sleep. She slowly unclosed her eyes and gazed into the mirror which her husband had arranged for that purpose. A faint smile flitted over her lips when she recognized how barely perceptible was now that crimson hand which had once blazed forth with such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their happiness. But then her eyes sought Aylmer’s face with a trouble and anxiety that he could by no means account for.

“My poor Aylmer!” murmured she. “Poor? Nay, richest, happiest, most favored!” exclaimed he. “My peer-

less bride, it is successful! You are perfect!” “My poor Aylmer,” she repeated, with a more than human tenderness,

“you have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that, with so

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high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!”

Alas! it was too true! The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birthmark—that sole token of human imperfection—faded from her cheek, the parting breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight. Then a hoarse, chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in its invariable triumph over the immortal essence which, in this dim sphere of half-development, demands the completeness of a higher state. Yet, had Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the self-same texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Describe Aylmer’s temperament and personality. How does he interpret Geor- giana’s birthmark? Why does he believe it should be removed from her cheek?

2. What is Georgiana’s own attitude toward her birthmark? 3. Describe the characterization of Aylmer’s assistant, Aminadab. In what ways is

Aminadab a stark contrast to Aylmer, both in appearance and in temperament? 4. What kind of relationship do Aylmer and Georgiana have? Does it seem typical

of the nineteenth-century marital relationship—the husband dominating the woman, the wife yielding gladly to the husband’s wishes?

5. What is the theme of this story? In what ways does the account of Georgiana’s birthmark and its removal elucidate the theme?

Critical Perspectives on Hawthorne

Richard Harter Fogle “Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark”*

The essence of Hawthorne is, in fact, distilled from the opposing elements

of simplicity and complexity. This essence is a clear liquid, with no apparent

cloudiness. Hawthorne, together with Henry James, perhaps, is the only

American novelist who has been able to see life whole without, in Thackeray’s

words, “roaring ai, ai, as loud as Prometheus,” like Melville, Wolfe, and

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*From Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark by Richard Harter Fogle (Norman: U of Oklahoma P), 1952: 4–7.

Faulkner; droning interminably an account of its details, like Dreiser; or falling

into a thin, shrill irony, the batlike twittering of souls in Hades, like all the sad

young men. Hawthorne’s tone is equable, “not harsh nor grating, but with ample

power to chasten and subdue.” He is a unique and wonderful combination of

light and darkness.

The light in Hawthorne is clarity of design. He has a classic balance; his

language is exquisitely lucid. He gives one the sense of an invulnerable dignity

and centrality; he is impenetrably self-possessed. He holds his characters

to the highest standards, for he literally brings them to judgment at the

bar of eternity as immortal souls. The “dark” in Hawthorne, that blackness

which Herman Melville applauded in him, is his tragic complexity. His clarity

is intermingled with subtlety, his statement interfused with symbolism, his

affirmation enriched with ambiguity. The whole which results is captivating.

In attack he is mild but deadly. His blow is so delicately delivered that a man

would have to turn his head in order to realize that he had just lost it. “The

Custom House” essay, for example, which rather oddly precedes The Scarlet

Letter, seems at first sight merely agreeable. Look closer, however, and the

effect is devastating. These gently humorous character portraits are murderous,

not from malice or heat, but from judgment and icy cold. Hawthorne is not

indignant; he is merely certain of his grounds. And his certainty is that of one

whose father was called “the sternest man who ever walked a deck.”

He is so entirely unsentimental that he does not need, as we sometimes

do, to avoid sentimentality. He combines sympathy with a classic aloofness,

participation with cool observation. “My father,” said Julian Hawthorne, “was

two men, one sympathetic and intuitional, the other critical and logical; together

they formed a combination which could not be thrown off its feet.” Thus

Hawthorne’s writing has a tone of exquisite gravity, harmonized strangely with

a pervasive irony and humor. In the use of irony he is a lighter, more sensitive

Fielding, with depths besides which Fielding could not plumb. In the matter of

irony Hawthorne’s antecedents in the eighteenth-century novel might well be

reexamined.

Corresponding to the clarity and the complexity of Hawthorne are his

“philosophy” and the crosscurrents which modify its course. For the best

understanding one should always attend to the thought of the author. But

one grasps that author wholly only by observing his characters, his settings,

the patterns of his diction, the trends of his imagery, the concrete mechanics

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of telling a story. What one has grasped is admittedly not easy to describe,

however—therefore the advantage of seizing upon the writer’s thought, which

can be systematically abstracted.

The philosophy of Hawthorne is a broadly Christian scheme which contains

heaven, earth, and hell. Whether heaven and hell are realities or only subjective

states of mind is one of Hawthorne’s crucial ambiguities. I do not call him

a Christian humanist, as do some excellent critics, for it seems to me that

heaven and hell are real to him and play too large a part in his fiction to be

relegated to the background. In his mixed macrocosm, man is a microcosm

also mixed. Man’s chief temptation is to forget his limits and complexities,

to think himself all good, or to think himself all bad. Either way he falls into

spiritual isolation and pride. He needs a proper mixture of the earthly and the

ideal—with a touch of the flame to temper it. Thus Aylmer, the scientist-hero of

“The Birthmark,” violates the covenant of humankind when he tries to eradicate

the only blemish of his beautiful wife, a tiny mark on her cheek. He succeeds,

but kills her in the process. The birthmark, which is shaped like a hand, is her

grip upon earthly existence. She dies to the sound of the laughter of Aminadab,

Aylmer’s assistant, a kind of earthfiend. Even the pit has its claims, which must

not be slighted. The conclusion epitomizes Hawthorne’s thinking: “. . . had

Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the

happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the self-same texture with

the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed

to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and living once for all in eternity, to

find the perfect future in the present.” There is a time for everything, and an

eternity. Aylmer should have waited.

But the system does not make the story. The tale of “The Minister’s Black

Veil” will illustrate the difference between an abstract and a literary meaning.

The minister dons the veil as an emblem of secret sin, of which all men are

presumably guilty. Elizabeth, his betrothed, implores him to discard it. The

minister has found a dreadful truth, while Elizabeth may have discovered a

greater—that men are evil and also good. The meaning lies not in either but

in both. So Hawthorne condemns his strange seekers, his Aylmers, his Ethan

Brands,o but he makes them noble. His reconciliation is not finally in logic, for

he accepts the mystery of existence. His reconciliation is the acceptance itself,

realized in balance, structure, and tone.

Ethan Brand: the title character of another short story by Hawthorne

James R. Mellow On “Young Goodman Brown”*

In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne relates the story of a young

newlywed, who, bidding good-bye to his beautiful young wife, Faith, sets off

for a secret appointment in the woods. Faith, her lace cap fluttering with pink

ribbons, pokes her head out the door to give her husband a parting kiss. She

pleads with him to remain at home that night. “A lone woman,” she says, “is

troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeard of herself,

sometimes.” Hawthorne makes the most of this ambiguous confession;

Goodman Brown, mistaking as jealousy his wife’s fears about her own

vulnerability, chides her for doubting him already, when they have been only

“three months married.”

Goodman Brown’s secret mission is to attend a midnight convocation of

witches in the forest. His sponsor, whom he meets along a darkening and gloomy

pathway, is an older man who carries a walking stick carved in the shape of a

writhing black serpent and who may well be the devil himself. Yet he bears a

strange resemblance to Goodman Brown’s father. In a moment of misgiving,

Goodman Brown remonstrates with his diabolical sponsor. “My father never went

into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him,” the young man

says. “We have been a race of honest men and good Christians, since the days

of the martyrs.” The devil contradicts him with an air of sweet reasonableness:

“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.” Moreover, he claims, he is on the best of terms with those people

whom Goodman Brown has been taught to revere—the deacons of the church,

the town selectmen. Even the governor, the devil intimates—then breaks off. “But

these are state secrets,” he says. Hawthorne may be indulging in a bit of wry

humor at this point, merging history and fiction. In borrowing from his own family

background and introducing (as he shortly does) the historical figures of Goody

Cloyse and Martha Carrier, two of the accused women of the witchcraft trials,

he slyly vindicates old John Hathorne. The fictional premise is that there were,

indeed, witches abroad in the land at the time of his stern Hathorne ancestors.

*From Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times by James R. Mellow (Boston: Houghton, 1980), 59–60.

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432 FICTION / THREE FEATURED WRITERS

At the witches’ Sabbath, Goodman Brown learns that his wife is to be

the other initiate at the infernal ceremonies. The two converts stand before

the burning altar; Faith is veiled. The devil exhorts them in a black sermon:

“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!” But just at the moment of initiation, when Goodman Brown pleads with his

wife to resist the devil, the entire scene dissolves. The reader is left to wonder

whether it has been a dream or a reality. The ambiguity is central to the story;

in Hawthorne, the actual deed or the mere imagination of it each has an effect.

In the morning, Goodman Brown returns to Salem village a different person—“a

stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man.”

Hawthorne is fascinated by the perverse normality of the world after some

great crisis of the heart or mind. The bland sunshine of an ordinary day greets

Goodman Brown. The minister whom he had witnessed at the witches’ revels

is calmly taking a walk before breakfast; Goody Cloyse is catechizing a little

girl who has brought her a pint of morning’s milk; Faith comes skipping to greet

her husband, her pink ribbons fluttering. He gives her a stern look and passes

on without a greeting. In this Yankee fable of the end of innocence, the young

American Adam, having tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and

evil, becomes a ruined man. He has been initiated into “the deep mystery of

sin”; he can sense the “secret deeds” of others. Goodman Brown shrinks from

society, becomes silent and morose until the end of his days. When he dies, no

comforting verse is carved on his tombstone—“for his dying hour was gloom.”

Nancy Bunge On “The Minister’s Black Veil”*

In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the Reverend Mr. Hooper startles his

congregation by appearing for Sunday services with a black piece of cloth over

his face. He wears the veil for the rest of his life, refusing to remove it even on

his deathbed. He protests he must display this symbol of his evil to serve as

a moral example: “What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made

this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his

friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the

*From Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction by Nancy Bunge (Boston: Twayne, 1993), 18–20.

eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem

me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around

me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!”

Hooper’s veil does educate. Others respond powerfully to him because it

forces them to confront their depravity: “Each member of the congregation, the

most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had

crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity

of deed or thought. . . . An unsought pathos came hand in hand with awe.”

While most attempt to evade this awareness, the dying realize they must face

it and call for the Reverend Mr. Hooper. The veil also improves Hooper’s funeral

sermons: “It was a tender and heart-dissolving prayer, full of sorrow, yet so

imbued with celestial hopes, that the music of a heavenly harp, swept by the

fingers of the dead, seemed faintly to be heard among the saddest accents

of the minister.” And, it ties him to the dead; one parishioner claims it makes

him “ghost-like,” and at the end of his career, “he had one congregation in

the church, and a more crowded one in the church-yard.” Because of the veil’s

positive consequences, many critics believe the tale validates Hooper’s behavior.

But Hooper’s parishioners disagree. They no longer welcome the minister

at weddings or Sunday dinner. They believe some occasions go more smoothly

without a living parable of evil present. People sin, but they also experience joy

and love. By turning himself into an unrelenting example of depravity, Hooper

demonstrates a lack of generosity, most of all toward himself. His veil shuts

out happiness, giving “a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things.” It

may even distort his religious views, for it “threw its obscurity between him and

the holy page, as he read the Scriptures.” A number of critics embrace this view

of Hooper. Nor surprisingly, a third critical contingent, the smallest, argues that

Hooper, like most human beings, is both noble and foolish.

Hooper’s fiancée, Elizabeth, sides with this group of commentators. When

she threatens to leave Hooper if he does not remove the veil, he begs her not

to abandon him: “‘Oh! you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened to

be alone behind my black veil. Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity for

ever!’” Indeed, it does isolate him: “Thus, from beneath the black veil, there

rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped

the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.” But Elizabeth

never leaves him. She sits at his deathbed, protecting the veil because it matters

to him and because she loves him: “There was the nurse, no hired handmaiden

of death, but one whose calm affection had endured thus long, in secrecy, in

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solitude, amid the chill of age, and would not perish, even at the dying hour.”

Love is there for Hooper, but the veil prevents him from seeing or enjoying it.

Judith Fetterley From “Women Beware Science: ‘The Birthmark’”

It is testimony at once to Hawthorne’s ambivalence, his seeking to cover

with one hand what he uncovers with the other, and to the pervasive sexism

of our culture that most readers would describe “The Birthmark” as a story

of failure rather than as the success story it really is—the demonstration

of how to murder your wife and get away with it. It is, of course, possible to

read “The Birthmark” as a story of misguided idealism, a tale of the unhappy

consequences of man’s nevertheless worthy passion for perfecting and

transcending nature; and this is the reading usually given it. This reading,

however, ignores the significance of the form idealism takes in the story. It is

not irrelevant that “The Birthmark” is about a man’s desire to perfect his wife,

nor is it accidental that the consequence of this idealism is the wife’s death.

In fact, “The Birthmark” provides a brilliant analysis of the sexual politics of

idealization and a brilliant exposure of the mechanisms whereby hatred can

be disguised as love, neurosis can be disguised as science, murder can be

disguised as idealization, and success can be disguised as failure. Thus,

Hawthorne’s insistence in his story on the metaphor of disguise serves as both

warning and clue to a feminist reading. . . .

One cannot imagine this story in reverse—that is, a woman’s discovering

an obsessive need to perfect her husband and deciding to perform experiments

on him—nor can one imagine the story being about a man’s conceiving such an

obsession for another man. It is woman, and specifically woman as wife, who

elicits the obsession with imperfection and the compulsion to achieve perfection,

just as it is man, and specifically man as husband, who is thus obsessed and

compelled. In addition, it is clear from the summary that the imagined perfection

is purely physical. Aylmer is not concerned with the quality of Georgiana’s

character or with the state of her soul, for he considers her “fit for heaven

without tasting death.” Rather, he is absorbed in her physical appearance, and

perfection for him is equivalent to physical beauty. Georgiana is an exemplum of

woman as beautiful object, reduced to and defined by her body. . . .

*From The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), 22–32.

“The Birthmark” demonstrates the fact that the idealization of women

has its source in a profound hostility toward women and that it is at once a

disguise for this hostility and the fullest expression of it.

The emotion that generates the drama of “The Birthmark” is revulsion.

Aylmer is moved not by the vision of Georgiana’s potential perfection but by his

horror at her present condition. His revulsion for the birthmark is insistent: he

can’t bear to see it or touch it; he has nightmares about it; he has to get it out.

Until she is “fixed,” he can hardly bear the sight of her and must hide her away

in secluded chambers which he visits only intermittently, so great is his fear

of contamination. Aylmer’s compulsion to perfect Georgiana is a result of his

horrified perception of what she actually is, and all his lofty talk about wanting

her to be perfect so that just this once the potential of Nature will be fulfilled is

but a cover for his central emotion of revulsion. . . .

If the motive force for Aylmer’s action in the story is repulsion, it is

the birthmark that is the symbolic location of all that repels him. And it is

important that the birthmark is just that: a birth mark, that is, something

physical; and a birth mark, that is, something not acquired but inherent,

one of Georgiana’s givens, in fact equivalent to her. The close connection

between Georgiana and her birthmark is continually emphasized. As her

emotions change, so does the birthmark, fading or deepening in response

to her feelings and providing a precise clue to her state of mind. Similarly,

when her senses are aroused, stroked by the influences that pervade her

chamber, the birthmark throbs sympathetically. In his efforts to get rid of the

birthmark Aylmer has “administered agents powerful enough to do aught except

change your entire physical system,” and these have failed. The object of

Aylmer’s obsessive revulsion, then, is Georgiana’s “physical system,” and what

defines this particular system is the fact that it is female. It is Georgiana’s

female physiology, which is to say her sexuality, that is the object of Aylmer’s

relentless attack. The link between Georgiana’s birthmark and her sexuality is

implicit in the birthmark’s role as her emotional barometer, but one specific

characteristic of the birthmark makes the connection explicit: the hand which

shaped Georgiana’s birth has left its mark on her in blood. The birthmark is

redolent with references to the particular nature of female sexuality; we hardly

need Aylmer’s insistence on seclusion, with its reminiscences of the treatment

of women when they are “unclean,” to point us in this direction. What repels

Aylmer is Georgiana’s sexuality; what is imperfect in her is the fact that she is

female; and what perfection means is elimination. . . .

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In exploring the sources of men’s compulsion to idealize women Hawthorne

is writing a story about the sickness of men, not a story about the flawed and

imperfect nature of women. There is a hint of the nature of Aylmer’s ailment in

the description of his relation to “mother” Nature, a suggestion that his revulsion

for Georgiana has its root in part in a jealousy of the power which her sexuality

represents and a frustration in the face of its impenetrable mystery. . . .

While “The Birthmark” is by no means explicitly feminist, since Hawthorne

seems as eager to be misread and to conceal as he is to be read and to

reveal, still it is impossible to read his story without being aware that Georgiana

is completely in Aylmer’s power. For the subject is finally power. Aylmer is

able to project himself onto Georgiana and to work out his obsession through

her because as woman and as wife she is his possession and in his power;

and because as man he has access to the language and structures of that

science which provides the mechanisms for such a process and legitimizes

it. In addition, since the power of definition and the authority to make those

definitions stick is vested in men, Aylmer can endow his illusions with the

weight of spiritual aspiration and universal truth.

The implicit feminism in “The Birthmark” is considerable. On one level

the story is a study of sexual politics, of the powerlessness of women and of

the psychology which results from that powerlessness. Hawthorne dramatizes

the fact that woman’s identity is a product of men’s responses to her. . . . To

those who love Georgiana, her birthmark is evidence of her beauty; to those

who envy or hate her, it is an object of disgust. It is Aylmer’s repugnance for

the birthmark that makes Georgiana blanch, thus causing the mark to emerge

as a sharply-defined blemish against the whiteness of her cheek. Clearly, the

birthmark takes on its character from the eye of the beholder. And just as

clearly Georgiana’s attitude toward her birthmark varies in response to different

observers and definers. Her self-image derives from internalizing the attitudes

toward her of the man or men around her. Since what surrounds Georgiana

is an obsessional attraction expressed as a total revulsion, the result is not

surprising: continual self-consciousness that leads to a pervasive sense of

shame and a self-hatred that terminates in an utter readiness to be killed. “The

Birthmark” demonstrates the consequences to women of being trapped in the

laboratory of man’s mind, the object of unrelenting scrutiny, examination, and

experimentation.

II. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) Since her death at age thirty-nine, Flannery O’Connor has become

widely regarded as one of America’s finest short story writers. Born in Savan- nah, Georgia, O’Connor attended the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop but shortly thereafter was diagnosed with lupus (the same degenerative blood disease that had claimed her father’s life when O’Connor was age fifteen). O’Connor returned to Georgia and lived with her mother outside Milledge- ville on a dairy farm known as Andalusia, where she devoted her limited physical energies to her writing. In addition to thirty-one short stories O’Connor published two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960); she also produced occasional essays, collected posthumously in a volume entitled Mystery and Manners (1969), in which she elucidated the aims of her fiercely original and often misunderstood fiction.

Although O’Connor usually wrote about the denizens of rural Geor- gia, most of whom were fundamentalist Protestants, O’Connor herself was a lifelong Roman Catholic who insisted that her Christian vision of human life and destiny informed all her writing. Her stories are populated by characters so eccentric they are often labeled “grotesque,” and her plots frequently are resolved through acts of violence. Like the grandmother in her most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s people are often prideful and hardheaded southerners whose confrontation with violence forces them to test their capacity for grace. Despite her religious themes, however, O’Connor is also an extremely funny writer. Her sharp eye for the absurd in human speech and behavior, combined with her well-honed sense of irony, has helped give her work its enduring appeal.

O’Connor’s devotion to her Catholic faith was matched by her fidelity to her craft: she was a meticulous writer who sometimes spent months on a single story, putting each manuscript through numerous revisions. The extraordinary structural integrity and stylistic near- perfection of her best stories are the result. In addition to “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the title story of her first collection (published in 1955), we present here “Good Country People” which also appeared in the 1955 collection, and the later story “Revelation,” which appeared in her posthumous 1965 collection, Everything That Rises Must Con- verge. Although differing in tone and content, these stories are vintage O’Connor, marked by her unique blend of the comic and the sublime; like all her best work, they portray faithfully the manners of ordinary southerners as they confront the ultimate mystery at the heart of this author’s apocalyptic vision.

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

A Good Man Is Hard to Find The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit

some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls him- self The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”

Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head- kerchief that had two points on the top like a rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. “The children have been to Florida before,” the old lady said. “You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.”

The children’s mother didn’t seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?” He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.

“She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day,” June Star said with- out raising her yellow head.

“Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?” the grandmother asked.

“I’d smack his face,” John Wesley said. “She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks,” June Star said.

“Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.” “All right, Miss,” the grandmother said. “Just remember that the next

time you want me to curl your hair.” June Star said her hair was naturally curly.

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a good man is hard to find First published in 1953. Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) spent most of her writing life in Milledgeville, Georgia. Though a devout Roman Catholic, she wrote about the denizens of the rural South, most of whom were fundamentalist Protestants. O’Connor’s people are often prideful, hardheaded Southerners whose confrontation with violence and death forces them to test their capacity for grace. O’Connor insisted that her Christian vision of human life and destiny informed all her writing.

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippo- potamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn’t intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel with a cat.

She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her. Bailey and the children’s mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.

The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty- five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The chil- dren were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.

“Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much,” John Wesley said.

“If I were a little boy,” said the grandmother, “I wouldn’t talk about my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.”

“Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground,” John Wesley said, “and Georgia is a lousy state too.”

“You said it,” June Star said. “In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers,

“children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little picka- ninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a

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shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.

“He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said. “He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little

niggers in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said.

The children exchanged comic books. The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children’s mother

passed him over the front seat to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cot- ton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island. “Look at the graveyard!” the grandmother said, pointing it out. “That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation.”

“Where’s the plantation?” John Wesley asked. “Gone With the Wind,” said the grandmother. “Ha. Ha.” When the children finished all the comic books they had brought,

they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star said he didn’t play fair, and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.

The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T.! This story tickled John Wesley’s funny bone and he giggled and giggled but June Star didn’t think it was any good. She said she wouldn’t marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.

They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sandwiches. The Tower was a part stucco and part wood filling station and dance hall set in a

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clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY’S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED SAMMY’S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH! A VETERAN! RED SAMMY’S YOUR MAN!

Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey sprang back into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children jump out of the car and run toward him.

Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other and dancing space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red Sam’s wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came and took their order. The children’s mother put a dime in the machine and played “The Tennes- see Waltz,” and the grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to dance but he only glared at her. He didn’t have a naturally sunny disposition like she did and trips made him nervous. The grandmother’s brown eyes were very bright. She swayed her head from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said play something she could tap to so the children’s mother put in another dime and played a fast number and June Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.

“Ain’t she cute?” Red Sam’s wife said, leaning over the counter. “Would you like to come be my little girl?”

“No I certainly wouldn’t,” June Star said. “I wouldn’t live in a broken- down place like this for a million bucks!” and she ran back to the table.

“Ain’t she cute?” the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely. “Aren’t you ashamed?” hissed the grandmother. Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter

and hurry up with these people’s order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. “You can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win,” and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. “These days you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth?”

“People are certainly not nice like they used to be,” said the grandmother. “Two fellers come in here last week,” Red Sammy said, “driving a

Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?”

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“Because you’re a good man!” the grandmother said at once. “Yes’m, I suppose so,” Red Sam said as if he were struck with this

answer. His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without

a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm. “It isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you can trust,” she said. “And I don’t count nobody out of that, not nobody,” she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.

“Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that’s escaped?” asked the grandmother.

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he didn’t attact this place right here,” said the woman. “If he hears about it being here, I wouldn’t be none sur- prised to see him. If he hears it’s two cent in the cash register, I wouldn’t be a tall surprised if he . . .”

“That’ll do,” Red Sam said. “Go bring these people their Co’-Colas,” and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.

“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”

He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right. The children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.

They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing. “There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, “and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Shermano came through but it was never found . . .”

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Sherman: William T. Sherman, Civil War general whose Union army marched through Confederate Georgia in 1864. leaving a trail of devastation among the civilian population

“Hey!” John Wesley said. “Let’s go see it! We’ll find it! We’ll poke all the woodwork and find it! Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can’t we turn off there?”

“We never have seen a house with a secret panel!” June Star shrieked. “Let’s go to the house with the secret panel! Hey Pop, can’t we go see the house with the secret panel!”

“It’s not far from here, I know,” the grandmother said. “It wouldn’t take over twenty minutes.”

Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. “No,” he said.

The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel. John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother’s shoulder and whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and John Wesley kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.

“All right!” he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. “Will you all shut up? Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don’t shut up, we won’t go anywhere.”

“It would be very educational for them,” the grandmother murmured. “All right,” Bailey said, “but get this: this is the only time we’re going

to stop for anything like this. This is the one and only time.” “The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back,” the

grandmother directed. “I marked it when we passed.” “A dirt road,” Bailey groaned. After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road,

the grandmother recalled other points about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.

“You can’t go inside this house,” Bailey said. “You don’t know who lives there.”

“While you all talk to the people in front, I’ll run around behind and get in a window,” John Wesley suggested.

“We’ll all stay in the car,” his mother said. They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a

swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day’s journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embank- ments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them.

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“This place had better turn up in a minute,” Bailey said, “or I’m going to turn around.”

The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months. “It’s not much farther,” the grandmother said and just as she said it,

a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upset- ting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder.

The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver’s seat with the cat—gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose—clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.

As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey’s wrath would not come down on her all at once. The hor- rible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.

Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the side of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children’s mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.

“But nobody’s killed,” June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to recover from the shock. They were all shaking.

“Maybe a car will come along,” said the children’s mother hoarsely. “I believe I have injured an organ,” said the grandmother, pressing her

side, but no one answered her. Bailey’s teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed in it and his face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided that she would not men- tion that the house was in Tennessee.

The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants

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were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dra- matically to attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile. There were three men in it.

It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a steady expressionless gaze to where they were sitting, and didn’t speak. Then he turned his head and muttered something to the other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. He came around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.

The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was hold- ing a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had guns.

“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed. The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was

someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was. He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn’t slip. He had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I see you all had you a little spill.”

“We turned over twice!” said the grandmother. “Oncet,” he corrected. “We seen it happen. Try their car and see will

it run, Hiram,” he said quietly to the boy with the gray hat. “What you got that gun for?” John Wesley asked. “Whatcha gonna

do with that gun?” “Lady,” the man said to the children’s mother, “would you mind

calling them children to sit down by you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together there where you’re at.”

“What are you telling US what to do for?” June Star asked. Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth. “Come

here,” said their mother. “Look here now,” Bailey began suddenly, “we’re in a predicament!

We’re in . . .” The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood

staring. “You’re The Misfit!” she said. “I recognized you at once!”

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“Yes’m,” the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, “but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.”

Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children. The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.

“Lady,” he said, “don’t you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don’t mean. I don’t reckon he meant to talk to you thataway.”

“You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.

The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up again. “I would hate to have to,” he said.

“Listen,” the grandmother almost screamed, “I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, “finest people in the world.” When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth. “God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold,” he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit squatted down on the ground. “Watch them children, Bobby Lee,” he said. “You know they make me nervous.” He looked at the six of them huddled together in front of him and he seemed to be embar- rassed as if he couldn’t think of anything to say. “Ain’t a cloud in the sky,” he remarked, looking up at it. “Don’t see no sun but don’t see no cloud neither.”

“Yes, it’s a beautiful day,” said the grandmother. “Listen,” she said, “you shouldn’t call yourself The Misfit because I know you’re a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell.”

“Hush!” Bailey yelled. “Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!” He was squatting in the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn’t move.

“I pre-chate that, lady,” The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt of his gun.

“It’ll take a half a hour to fix this here car,” Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of it.

“Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you,” The Misfit said, pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. “The boys want to ast you something,” he said to Bailey. “Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with them?”

“Listen,” Bailey began, “we’re in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is,” and his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained perfectly still.

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The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground. Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught hold of his father’s hand and Bobby Lee followed. They went off toward the woods and just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and supporting him- self against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, “I’ll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!”

“Come back this instant!” his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.

“Bailey Boy!” the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at The Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her. “I just know you’re a good man,” she said desperately. “You’re not a bit common!”

“Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The Misfit said after a second as if he had considered her statement carefully, “but I ain’t the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!’” He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. “I’m sorry I don’t have on a shirt before you ladies,” he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. “We buried our clothes that we had on when we escaped and we’re just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks we met,” he explained.

“That’s perfectly all right,” the grandmother said. “Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his suitcase.”

“I’ll look and see terrectly,” The Misfit said. “Where are they taking him?” the children’s mother screamed. “Daddy was a card himself,” The Misfit said. “You couldn’t put

anything over on him. He never got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them.”

“You could be honest too if you’d only try,” said the grandmother. “Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time.”

The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it. “Yes’m, somebody is always after you,” he murmured.

The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind his hat because she was standing up looking down on him. “Do you ever pray?” she asked.

He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. “Nome,” he said.

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There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady’s head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath. “Bailey Boy!” she called.

“I was a gospel singer for a while,” The Misfit said. “I been most everything. Been in the arm service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet,” and looked up at the children’s mother and the little girl who were sit- ting close together, their faces white and their eyes glassy; “I even seen a woman flogged,” he said.

“Pray, pray,” the grandmother began, “pray, pray . . .” “I never was a bad boy that I remember of,” The Misfit said in an

almost dreamy voice, “but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive,” and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.

“That’s when you should have started to pray,” she said. “What did you do to get sent to the penitentiary that first time?”

“Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceil- ing, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.”

“Maybe they put you in by mistake,” the old lady said vaguely. “Nome,” he said. “It wasn’t no mistake. They had the papers on me.” “You must have stolen something,” she said. The Misfit sneered slightly. “Nobody had nothing I wanted,” he said.

“It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself.”

“If you would pray,” the old lady said, “Jesus would help you.” “That’s right,” The Misfit said. “Well then, why don’t you pray?” she asked trembling with delight

suddenly. “I don’t want no hep,” he said. “I’m doing all right by myself.” Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby Lee

was dragging a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it. “Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. The shirt came fly-

ing at him and landed on his shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn’t name what the shirt reminded her of. “No, lady,” The Misfit said

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while he was buttoning it up, “I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”

The children’s mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn’t get her breath. “Lady,” he asked, “would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your husband?”

“Yes, thank you,” the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled help- lessly and she was holding the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. “Hep that lady up, Hiram,” The Misfit said as she struggled to climb out of the ditch, “and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl’s hand.”

“I don’t want to hold hands with him,” June Star said. “He reminds me of a pig.”

The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and pulled her off into the woods after Hiram and her mother.

Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus, Jesus,” meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.

“Yes’m,” The Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course,” he said, “they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signa- ture and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”

There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. “Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?”

“Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!”

“Lady,” The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, “there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.”

There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.

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“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead.” The Misfit con- tinued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by kill- ing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

“Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.

Without his glasses, The Misfit’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. “Take her off and thow her where you thown the others,” he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg.

“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said. “Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. The family members surrounding the grandmother are carefully portrayed. Discuss their characterizations and the way they affect our perceptions of the grandmother.

2. Some readers have found the grandmother sympathetic and others have found her a figure of evil, portrayed with imagery often associated with witches. How

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can these conflicting responses be resolved? Is she more or less sympathetic than the other members of her family?

3. What is the function of the scene at Red Sammy’s barbecue place? How does it advance the plot? the theme?

4. During the conversation between the grandmother and Red Sammy, they dis- cuss the difficulty of finding a “good man” in the modern world. Is this a plain statement of the theme, or does the context of their conversation make the dialogue ironic? How does their discussion relate to the larger dramatization of good and evil in the story?

5. The story makes extensive use of animal symbolism. Find the many references to animals and discuss the overall significance of this motif.

6. Analyze The Misfit’s motivation for killing the family and for his criminal behavior in general. Unlike his sidekicks, he has a philosophical temperament and carefully rationalizes his behavior. What do his remarks contribute to the theme of the story?

7. Why do the murders of the grandmother’s family members take place “off- stage,” out in the woods? Could it be argued that this heightens the effect of the violence?

8. At the end of the story, what does The Misfit mean when he says of the grand- mother, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (paragraph 140)?

9. Reread the description of the grandmother after she has been murdered and is lying in the ditch (paragraph 137). Why is she described in this way?

10. In an essay, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable,” O’Connor argues that just before the grandmother’s death “Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship. . . . And at this point she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.” Compare these comments with your own initial sense of the climactic scene. Does O’Connor’s “reading” of this scene differ from your own? Does her commentar y change your understanding of the stor y?

11. In the same essay, O’Connor argues that not only is The Misfit more intelligent than the grandmother but his “capacity for grace” is greater than hers. Do you agree with this remark? Why or why not?

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Good Country People Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone,

Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like

GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE First published in 1955. See the footnote to “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (page 438) for more information on O’Connor and her career.

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the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often neces- sary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong on any point. She would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t,” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an assort- ment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of them figs you put up last summer.”

They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at break- fast. Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an arti- ficial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty- two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae; Joy called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last report.

Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as a reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet she’s dead, that’s all.

She’ll want to know all your business. I can stand him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days.

She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything—she would give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack. She had hired the Freemans and she had kept them four years.

Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.

When Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say, “I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not first been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs. Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place a while, “You know, you’re the wheel behind the wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know it. I’ve always been quick. It’s some that are quicker than others.”

“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said. “It takes all kinds to make the world.” “I always said it did myself.” The girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of

it for dinner; sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest they ate in the kitchen because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always managed to arrive at some point during the meal and to watch them finish it. She would stand in the doorway if it were summer but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on top of the refrigerator and look down on them, or she would stand by the gas heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly. Occasionally she would stand against the wall and roll her head from side to side. At no time was she in any hurry to leave. All this was very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a woman of great patience. She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good

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country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them.

She had had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would want to be around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her husband long ago, needed someone to walk over the fields with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for these services, her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am—LIKE I AM.”

Mrs. Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. Her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.

When Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her Joy to which the girl responded but in a purely mechanical way.

Hulga had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from tak- ing walks with her mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when they occupied attention that might otherwise have been directed at her. At first she had thought she could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found that it was not possible to be rude to her. Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days together she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was always obscure; a direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to her face—these never touched her. And without warning one day, she began calling her Hulga.

She did not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been incensed but when she and the girl happened to be out of the house together, she would say something and add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her pri- vacy had been intruded upon. She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name

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working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga. However, Mrs. Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact. Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she pre- ferred the lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it had happened an hour ago.

When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making the awful noise but she made it—Mrs. Hopewell was certain—because it was ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be in her red kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would be sitting at the table, finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be hanging by her elbow outward from the refrigerator, looking down at the table. Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil and then stood over them with her arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her—a kind of indirect gaze divided between her and Mrs. Freeman—and would think that if she would only keep her- self up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was nothing wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help. Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not.

Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it would have been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had certainly not brought her out any and now that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had “gone through.” Anyhow, she would not have been strong enough to go again. The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condi- tion, she would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well picture her there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a

O’CONNOR / GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE 455

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horse embossed on it. She thought this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply that she was still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and more like herself—bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said—without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full—“Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that on. She had only made the remark, hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone.

The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daugh- ter is a schoolteacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of Nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill.

This morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. “She thrown up four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in the night after three o’clock. Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble in the bureau drawer. All she did. Stand up there and see what she could run up on.”

“She’s got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversa- tion she could possibly have had with him.

He was a tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that

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weighted him so heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door facing. He seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a cheer- ful voice. “Good morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the suitcase down on the mat. He was not a bad-looking young man though he had on a bright blue suit and yellow socks that were not pulled up far enough. He had promi- nent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.

“I’m Mrs. Hopewell,” she said. “Oh!” he said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes spar-

kling, “I saw it said The Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!” and he burst out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel and under cover of a pant, he fell forward into her hall. It was rather as if the suitcase had moved first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he said and grabbed her hand. “I hope you are well!” and he laughed again and then all at once his face sobered completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and said, “Lady, I’ve come to speak of serious things.”

“Well, come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost ready. He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a straight chair and put the suitcase between his feet and glanced around the room as if he were sizing her up by it. Her silver gleamed on the two sideboards; she decided he had never been in a room as elegant as this.

“Mrs. Hopewell,” he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost intimate, “I know you believe in Chrustian service.”

“Well yes,” she murmured. “I know,” he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked

on one side, “that you’re a good woman. Friends have told me.” Mrs. Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. “What are you

selling?” she asked. “Bibles,” the young man said and his eye raced around the room before

he added, “I see you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one lack you got!”

Mrs. Hopewell could not say, “My daughter is an atheist and won’t let me keep the Bible in the parlor.” She said, stiffening slightly, “I keep my Bible by my bedside.” This was not the truth. It was in the attic somewhere.

“Lady,” he said, “the word of God ought to be in the parlor.” “Well, I think that’s a matter of taste,” she began. “I think . . .” “Lady,” he said, “for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every

room in the house besides in his heart. I know you’re a Chrustian because I can see it in every line of your face.”

She stood up and said, “Well, young man, I don’t want to buy a Bible and I smell my dinner burning.”

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He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth—not many people want to buy one nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”

“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ’round. That’s life!”

“You said a mouthful,” he said. “Why, I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!”

she said, stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!” His face had brightened. “I didn’t intraduce myself,” he said. “I’m

Manley Pointer from out in the country around Willohobie, not even from a place, just from near a place.”

“You wait a minute,” she said. “I have to see about my dinner.” She went out to the kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had been listening.

“Get rid of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.” Mrs. Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under

the vegetables. “I can’t be rude to anybody,” she murmured and went back into the parlor.

He had opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee. “You might as well put those up,” she told him. “I don’t want one.” “I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “You don’t see any more real hon-

est people unless you go way out in the country.” “I know,” she said, “real genuine folks!” Through the crack in the door

she heard a groan. “I guess a lot of boys come telling you they’re working their way

through college,” he said, “but I’m not going to tell you that. Somehow,” he said, “I don’t want to go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian service. See,” he said, lowering his voice, “I got this heart condition. I may not live long. When you know it’s something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then, lady . . .” He paused, with his mouth open, and stared at her.

He and Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling with tears but she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’d love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she heard herself say it.

“Yes mam,” he said in an abashed voice, “I would sher love to do that!” Joy had given him one look on being introduced to him and then

throughout the meal had not glanced at him again. He had addressed sev-

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eral remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hopewell could not understand deliberate rudeness, although she lived with it, and she felt she had always to overflow with hospitality to make up for Joy’s lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk about himself and he did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve and that his father had been crushed under a tree when he himself was eight year old. He had been crushed very badly, in fact, almost cut in two and was practically not recognizable. His mother had got along the best she could by hard working and she had always seen that her children went to Sunday School and that they read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen year old and he had been selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold seventy-seven Bibles and had the promise of two more sales. He wanted to become a missionary because he thought that was the way you could do most for people. “He who losest his life shall find it,” he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and earnest that Mrs. Hopewell would not for the world have smiled. He pre- vented his peas from sliding onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread which he later cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy observing side-wise how he handled his knife and fork and she saw too that every few minutes, the boy would dart a keen appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to attract her attention.

After dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs. Hopewell was left to talk with him. He told her again about his child- hood and his father’s accident and about various things that had happened to him. Every five minutes or so she would stifle a yawn. He sat for two hours until finally she told him she must go because she had an appoint- ment in town. He packed his Bibles and thanked her and prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped and wrung her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said she would always be happy to see him.

Joy had been standing in the road, apparently looking at something in the distance, when he came down the steps toward her, bent to the side with his heavy valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her directly. Mrs. Hopewell could not hear what he said but she trembled to think what Joy would say to him. She could see that after a minute Joy said something and that then the boy began to speak again, making an excited gesture with his free hand. After a minute Joy said something else at which the boy began to speak once more. Then to her amazement, Mrs. Hopewell saw the two of them walk off together, toward the gate. Joy had walked all the way to the gate with him and Mrs. Hopewell could not imagine what they had said to each other, and she had not yet dared to ask.

Mrs. Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the refrigerator to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face

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her in order to seem to be listening. “Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night,” she said. “She had this sty.”

“Hill,” Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the garage?”

“Nome, he’s the one that goes to chiropracter school,” Mrs. Freeman said. “She had this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she says, ‘How?’ and he says, ‘You just lay yourself down across the seat of that car and I’ll show you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning,” Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.”

“I never heard of that before,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “He ast her to marry him before the Ordinary,” Mrs. Freeman went on,

“and she told him she wan’t going to be married in no office.” “Well, Glynese is a fine girl,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Glynese and

Carramae are both fine girls.” “Carramae said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure

felt sacred to him. She said he said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars for being married by a preacher.”

“How much would he take?” the girl asked from the stove. “He said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars,” Mrs. Freeman

repeated. “Well we all have work to do,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Lyman said it just felt more sacred to him,” Mrs. Freeman said. “The doctor wants Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine.

Says them cramps is coming from pressure. You know where I think it is?” “She’ll be better in a few weeks,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “In the tube,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Else she wouldn’t be as sick as she is.” Hulga had cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them

to the table along with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat down carefully and began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by questions if for any reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could perceive her mother’s eye on her. The first round-about question would be about the Bible salesman and she did not wish to bring it on. “How did he pop her neck?” she asked.

Mrs. Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck. She said he owned a ’55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if he had a ’32 Plymouth and Mrs.Freeman said what Glynese had said was a ’36 Plymouth.

Mrs. Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese’s common sense. She said what she admired in those girls was their common sense. She said that reminded her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a

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young man selling Bibles. “Lord,” she said, “he bored me to death but he was so sincere and genuine I couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know,” she said, “—just the salt of the earth.”

“I seen him walk up,” Mrs. Freeman said, “and then later—I seen him walk off,” and Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight insinuation, that he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained expressionless but the color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow it down with the next spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her as if they had a secret together.

“Well, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go ’round,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “It’s very good we aren’t all alike.”

“Some people are more alike than others,” Mrs. Freeman said. Hulga got up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was

necessary, into her room and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o’clock at the gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it as a great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it. She had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface but that reached below to depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of. Their conversation yesterday had been of this kind.

He had stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was bony and sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it, and his look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watch- ing a new fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered, “You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?”

The girl looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. “Yes,” she presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.

“It must have been mighty small!” he said triumphantly and shook all over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsid- ing finally into his gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression remained exactly the same.

“How old are you?” he asked softly. She waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she

said, “Seventeen.” His smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a

little lake. “I see you got a wooden leg,” he said. “I think you’re brave. I think you’re real sweet.”

The girl stood blank and solid and silent.

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“Walk to the gate with me,” he said. “You’re a brave sweet little thing and I liked you the minute I seen you walk in the door.”

Hulga began to move forward. “What’s your name?” he asked, smiling down on the top of her head. “Hulga,” she said. “Hulga,” he murmured, “Hulga, Hulga. I never heard of anybody

name Hulga before. You’re shy, aren’t you, Hulga?” he asked. She nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant

valise. “I like girls that wear glasses,” he said. “I think a lot. I’m not like

these people that a serious thought don’t ever enter their heads. It’s because I may die.”

“I may die too,” she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were very small and brown, glittering feverishly.

“Listen,” he said, “don’t you think some people was meant to meet on account of what all they got in common and all? Like they both think serious thoughts and all?” He shifted the valise to his other hand so that the hand nearest her was free. He caught hold of her elbow and shook it a little. “I don’t work on Saturday,” he said. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er the hills and far away. Pic-nics and things. Couldn’t we go on a pic-nic tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga,” he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his insides about to drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward her.

During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imag- ined that the two of them walked on the place until they came to the storage barn beyond the two back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. She imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful.

She set off for the gate at exactly ten o’clock, escaping without drawing Mrs. Hopewell’s attention. She didn’t take anything to eat, forgetting that food is usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty white shirt, and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar of it since she did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no one was there.

She looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feel- ing that she had been tricked, that he had only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a bush on the opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was new and wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered if he had bought it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and white band around it and was slightly too large for him.

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He stepped from behind the bush still carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks sucked down in his shoes from walking. He crossed the highway and said, “I knew you’d come!”

The girl wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the valise and asked, “Why did you bring your Bibles?”

He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. “You can never tell when you’ll need the word of God, Hulga,” he said. She had a moment in which she doubted that this was actually happening and then they began to climb the embankment. They went down into the pasture toward the woods. The boy walked lightly by her side, bouncing on his toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy today; he even swung it. They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, “Where does your wooden leg join on?”

She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,” he said. “I only meant you’re so brave and all. I guess God takes care of you.”

“No,” she said, looking forward and walking fast, “I don’t even believe in God.”

At this he stopped and whistled. “No!” he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.

She walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat. “That’s very unusual for a girl,” he remarked, watching her out of the corner of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.

The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind’s con- trol. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.

He came along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root that she might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying blades of thorn vine until she had passed beyond them. She led the way and he came breathing heavily behind her. Then they came out on a sunlit hillside, sloping softly into another one a little smaller. Beyond, they could see the rusted top of the old barn where the extra hay was stored.

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The hill was sprinkled with small pink weeds. “Then you ain’t saved?” he asked suddenly, stopping.

The girl smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. “In my economy,” she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in God.”

Nothing seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she walked on before he had the chance.

“Ain’t there somewheres we can sit down sometime?” he murmured, his voice softening toward the end of the sentence.

“In that barn,” she said. They made for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a

large two-story barn, cool and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led into the loft and said, “It’s too bad we can’t go up there.”

“Why can’t we?” she asked. “Yer leg,” he said reverently. The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on

the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down at him and said, “Well, come on if you’re coming,” and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.

“We won’t need the Bible,” she observed. “You never can tell,” he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he

was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front open- ing of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue. The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not to interfere. When her glasses got in his way, he took them off of her and slipped them into his pocket.

The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and the kisses were sticky like a child’s. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy fretting of a child being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her

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feelings. “You ain’t said you loved me none,” he whispered finally, pulling back from her. “You got to say that.”

She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She didn’t realize he had taken her glasses but this landscape could not seem exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close attention to her surroundings.

“You got to say it,” he repeated. “You got to say you love me.” She was always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she

began, “if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a word I use. I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.”

The boy was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,” he said.

The girl looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she mur- mured. “It’s just as well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”

The boy’s astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair. “Okay,” he almost whined, “but do you love me or don’tcher?”

“Yes,” she said and added, “in a sense. But I must tell you something. There mustn’t be anything dishonest between us.” She lifted his head and looked him in the eye. “I am thirty years old,” she said. “I have a number of degrees.”

The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”

“Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.” She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had

seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.

He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he whispered.

The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it

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as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. “No,” she said.

“I known it,” he muttered, sitting up. “You’re just playing me for a sucker.”

“Oh no no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to see it?”

The boy gave her a long penetrating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.”

She sat staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, “All right,” it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his.

Very gently he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy’s face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, “Now show me how to take it off and on.”

She took it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself, handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. “See!” he said with a delighted child’s face. “Now I can do it myself!”

“Put it back on,” she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again. “Put it back on,” she said.

“Not yet,” he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. “Leave it off for a while. You got me instead.”

She gave a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at. Different expressions raced back and forth over her face. Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood. Finally she pushed him off and said, “Put it back on me now.”

“Wait,” he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened, it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine

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of a goddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take a swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her, but like one mesmerized, she did not move.

Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured, “aren’t you just good country people?”

The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said, curl- ing his lip slightly, “but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.”

“Give me my leg,” she said. He pushed it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to

have us a good time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one another good yet.”

“Give me my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.

“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. “You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!”

Her face was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them, all—say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect Christian, you’re . . .”

The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”

“Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself.

When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. “I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing

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ever since I was born!” and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.

Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, dig- ging up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”

Mrs. Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil- smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that simple,” she said. “I know I never could.”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Consider the use of irony in this story. What different types of irony does O’Connor employ?

2. The story features a “frame narrative” involving a minor character, Mrs. Freeman. How does this structure relate to the meaning? What does Mrs. Freeman add to the story?

3. Discuss the use of name symbolism. How do the names Mrs. Hopewell, Mrs. Freeman, Joy/Hulga, and Manley Pointer relate to their respective characterizations?

4. Why does Joy/Hulga take an interest in the Bible salesman? What does she hope to gain by interacting with him?

5. How would you describe the relationship between Joy/Hulga and her mother? Do you think the relationship will change after the story’s conclusion?

6. What is the symbolic meaning of Joy/Hulga’s wooden leg? How does her own view of it differ from the reader’s as the story proceeds?

7. How is Mrs. Hopewell characterized? Is she a sympathetic character? Does the reader’s view of her change during the story?

8. Does Joy/Hulga experience an epiphany by the end of the story? Why is her face described as “churning” in the final scene? Do you think she will undergo any permanent change?

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Revelation The doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full

when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the head of the

REVELATION First published in 1965. See the footnote to “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (page 438) for more information on O’Connor and her career.

magazine table set in the center of it, a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation. There was one vacant chair and a place on a sofa occupied by a blond child in a dirty blue romper who should have been told to move over and make room for the lady. He was five or six, but Mrs. Turpin saw at once that no one was going to tell him to move over. He was slumped down in the seat, his arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in his head; his nose ran unchecked.

Mrs. Turpin put a firm hand on Claud’s shoulder and said in a voice that included anyone who wanted to listen, “Claud, you sit in that chair there,” and gave him a push down into the vacant one. Claud was florid and bald and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin, but he sat down as if he were accustomed to doing what she told him to.

Mrs. Turpin remained standing. The only man in the room besides Claud was a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee, whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead or pre- tending to be so as not to get up and offer her his seat. Her gaze settled agreeably on a well-dressed grey-haired lady whose eyes met hers and whose expression said: if that child belonged to me, he would have some manners and move over—there’s plenty of room there for you and him too.

Claud looked up with a sigh and made as if to rise. “Sit down,” Mrs. Turpin said. “You know you’re not supposed to stand

on that leg. He has an ulcer on his leg,” she explained. Claud lifted his foot onto the magazine table and rolled his trouser leg

up to reveal a purple swelling on a plump marble-white calf. “My!” the pleasant lady said. “How did you do that?” “A cow kicked him,” Mrs. Turpin said. “Goodness!” said the lady. Claud rolled his trouser leg down. “Maybe the little boy would move over,” the lady suggested, but the

child did not stir. “Somebody will be leaving in a minute,” Mrs. Turpin said. She could

not understand why a doctor—with as much money as they made charg- ing five dollars a day to just stick their head in the hospital door and look at you—couldn’t afford a decent-sized waiting room. This one was hardly bigger than a garage. The table was cluttered with limp-looking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green glass ash tray full of cigaret butts and cotton wads with little blood spots on them. If she had had anything to do with the running of the place, that would have been emptied every so often. There were no chairs against the wall at the head of the room. It had a rectangular-shaped panel in it that permitted a view of the office where the nurse came and went and the secretary listened to the radio. A plastic

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fern in a gold pot sat in the opening and trailed its fronds down almost to the floor. The radio was softly playing gospel music.

Just then the inner door opened and a nurse with the highest stack of yellow hair Mrs. Turpin had ever seen put her face in the crack and called for the next patient. The woman sitting beside Claud grasped the two arms of her chair and hoisted herself up; she pulled her dress free from her legs and lumbered through the door where the nurse had disappeared.

Mrs. Turpin eased into the vacant chair, which held her tight as a corset. “I wish I could reduce,” she said, and rolled her eyes and gave a comic sigh.

“Oh, you aren’t fat,” the stylish lady said. “Ooooo I am too,” Mrs. Turpin said. “Claud he eats all he wants to

and never weighs over one hundred and seventy-five pounds, but me I just look at something good to eat and I gain some weight,” and her stomach and shoulders shook with laughter. “You can eat all you want to, can’t you, Claud?” she asked, turning to him.

Claud only grinned. “Well, as long as you have such a good disposition,” the stylish lady

said, “I don’t think it makes a bit of difference what size you are. You just can’t beat a good disposition.”

Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled Human Development. The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her looks. She appeared annoyed that anyone should speak while she tried to read. The poor girl’s face was blue with acne and Mrs. Turpin thought how pitiful it was to have a face like that at that age. She gave the girl a friendly smile but the girl only scowled the harder. Mrs. Turpin herself was fat but she had always had good skin, and, though she was forty-seven years old, there was not a wrinkle in her face except around her eyes from laughing too much.

Next to the ugly girl was the child, still in exactly the same position, and next to him was a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress. She and Claud had three sacks of chicken feed in their pump house that was in the same print. She had seen from the first that the child belonged with the old woman. She could tell by the way they sat—kind of vacant and white- trashy, as if they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up. And at right angles but next to the well-dressed pleasant lady was a lank-faced woman who was certainly the child’s mother. She had on a yellow sweat shirt and wine-colored slacks, both gritty-looking, and the rims of her lips were stained with snuff. Her dirty yellow hair was tied behind with a little piece of red paper ribbon. Worse than niggers any day, Mrs. Turpin thought.

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The gospel hymn playing was, “When I looked up and He looked down,” and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.”

Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people’s feet. The well-dressed lady had on red and grey suede shoes to match her dress. Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent leather pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them—exactly what you would have expected her to have on.

Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please, Jesus, please,” she would have said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available,” and he would have said, “No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro-woman, herself but black.

Next to the child’s mother was a red-headed youngish woman, reading one of the magazines and working a piece of chewing gum, hell for leather, as Claud would say. Mrs. Turpin could not see the woman’s feet. She was not white-trash, just common. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white- face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.

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“That’s a beautiful clock,” she said and nodded to her right. It was a big wall clock, the face encased in a brass sunburst.

“Yes, it’s very pretty,” the stylish lady said agreeably. “And right on the dot too,” she added, glancing at her watch.

The ugly girl beside her cast an eye upward at the clock, smirked, then looked directly at Mrs. Turpin and smirked again. Then she returned her eyes to her book. She was obviously the lady’s daughter because, although they didn’t look anything alike as to disposition, they both had the same shape of face and the same blue eyes. On the lady they sparkled pleasantly but in the girl’s seared face they appeared alternately to smolder and to blaze.

What if Jesus had said, “All right, you can be white-trash or a nigger or ugly”!

Mrs. Turpin felt an awful pity for the girl, though she thought it was one thing to be ugly and another to act ugly.

The woman with the snuff-stained lips turned around in her chair and looked up at the clock. Then she turned back and appeared to look a little to the side of Mrs. Turpin. There was a cast in one of her eyes. “You want to know wher you can get you one of them ther clocks?” she asked in a loud voice.

“No, I already have a nice clock,” Mrs. Turpin said. Once somebody like her got a leg in the conversation, she would be all over it.

“You can get you one with green stamps,” the woman said. “That’s most likely wher he got hisn. Save you up enough, you can get you most anythang. I got me some joo’ry.”

Ought to have got you a wash rag and some soap, Mrs. Turpin thought. “I get contour sheets with mine,” the pleasant lady said. The daughter slammed her book shut. She looked straight in front of

her, directly through Mrs. Turpin and on through the yellow curtain and the plate glass window which made the wall behind her. The girl’s eyes seemed lit all of a sudden with a peculiar light, an unnatural light like night road signs give. Mrs. Turpin turned her head to see if there was any- thing going on outside that she should see, but she could not see anything. Figures passing cast only a pale shadow through the curtain. There was no reason the girl should single her out for her ugly looks.

“Miss Finley,” the nurse said, cracking the door. The gum-chewing woman got up and passed in front of her and Claud and went into the office. She had on red high-heeled shoes.

Directly across the table, the ugly girl’s eyes were fixed on Mrs. Turpin as if she had some very special reason for disliking her.

“This is wonderful weather, isn’t it?” the girl’s mother said. “It’s good weather for cotton if you can get the niggers to pick it,”

Mrs. Turpin said, “but niggers don’t want to pick cotton any more. You

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can’t get the white folks to pick it and now you can’t get the niggers— because they got to be right up there with the white folks.”

“They gonna try anyways,” the white-trash woman said, leaning for- ward.

“Do you have one of those cotton-picking machines?” the pleasant lady asked.

“No,” Mrs. Turpin said, “they leave half the cotton in the field. We don’t have much cotton anyway. If you want to make it farming now, you have to have a little of everything. We got a couple of acres of cotton and a few hogs and chickens and just enough white-face that Claud can look after them himself.”

“One thang I don’t want,” the white-trash woman said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hands. “Hogs. Nasty stinking things, a-gruntin and a-rootin all over the place.”

Mrs. Turpin gave her the merest edge of her attention. “Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink,” she said. “They’re cleaner than some chil- dren I’ve seen. Their feet never touch the ground. We have a pig-parlor— that’s where you raise them on concrete,” she explained to the pleasant lady, “and Claud scoots them down with the hose every afternoon and washes off the floor.” Cleaner by far than that child right there, she thought. Poor nasty little thing. He had not moved except to put the thumb of his dirty hand into his mouth.

The woman turned her face away from Mrs. Turpin. “I know I wouldn’t scoot down no hog with no hose,” she said to the wall.

You wouldn’t have no hog to scoot down, Mrs. Turpin said to herself. “A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin,” the woman muttered. “We got a little of everything,” Mrs. Turpin said to the pleasant lady.

“It’s no use in having more than you can handle yourself with help like it is. We found enough niggers to pick our cotton this year but Claud he has to go after them and take them home again in the evening. They can’t walk that half a mile. No they can’t. I tell you,” she said and laughed merrily, “I sure am tired of buttering up niggers, but you got to love em if you want em to work for you. When they come in the morning, I run out and I say, ‘Hi yawl this morning?’ and when Claud drives them off to the field I just wave to beat the band and they just wave back.” And she waved her hand rapidly to illustrate.

“Like you read out of the same book,” the lady said, showing she understood perfectly.

“Child, yes,” Mrs. Turpin said. “And when they come in from the field, I run out with a bucket of icewater. That’s the way it’s going to be from now on,” she said. “You may as well face it.”

“One thang I know,” the white-trash woman said. “Two thangs I ain’t going to do: love no niggers or scoot down no hog with no hose.” And she let out a bark of contempt.

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The look that Mrs. Turpin and the pleasant lady exchanged indicated they both understood that you had to have certain things before you could know certain things. But every time Mrs. Turpin exchanged a look with the lady, she was aware that the ugly girl’s peculiar eyes were still on her, and she had trouble bringing her attention back to the conversation.

“When you got something,” she said, “you got to look after it.” And when you ain’t got a thing but breath and britches, she added to herself, you can afford to come to town every morning and just sit on the Court House copingº and spit.

A grotesque revolving shadow passed across the curtain behind her and was thrown palely on the opposite wall. Then a bicycle clattered down against the outside of the building. The door opened and a colored boy glided in with a tray from the drug store. It had two large red and white paper cups on it with tops on them. He was a tall, very black boy in dis- colored white pants and a green nylon shirt. He was chewing gum slowly, as if to music. He set the tray down in the office opening next to the fern and stuck his head through to look for the secretary. She was not in there. He rested his arms on the ledge and waited, his narrow bottom stuck out, swaying slowly to the left and right. He raised a hand over his head and scratched the base of his skull.

“You see that button there, boy?” Mrs. Turpin said. “You can punch that and she’ll come. She’s probably in the back somewhere.”

“Is thas right?” the boy said agreeably, as if he had never seen the but- ton before. He leaned to the right and put his finger on it. “She sometime out,” he said and twisted around to face his audience, his elbows behind him on the counter. The nurse appeared and he twisted back again. She handed him a dollar and he rooted in his pocket and made the change and counted it out to her. She gave him fifteen cents for a tip and he went out with the empty tray. The heavy door swung to slowly and closed at length with the sound of suction. For a moment no one spoke.

“They ought to send all them niggers back to Africa,” the white-trash woman said. “That’s wher they come from in the first place.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do without my good colored friends,” the pleasant lady said.

“There’s a heap of things worse than a nigger,” Mrs. Turpin agreed. “It’s all kinds of them just like it’s all kinds of us.”

“Yes, and it takes all kinds to make the world go round,” the lady said in her musical voice.

As she said it, the raw-complexioned girl snapped her teeth together. Her lower lip turned downwards and inside out, revealing the pale pink

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inside of her mouth. After a second it rolled back up. It was the ugliest face Mrs. Turpin had ever seen anyone make and for a moment she was certain that the girl had made it at her. She was looking at her as if she had known and disliked her all her life—all of Mrs. Turpin’s life, it seemed too, not just all the girl’s life. Why, girl, I don’t even know you, Mrs. Turpin said silently.

She forced her attention back to the discussion. “It wouldn’t be prac- tical to send them back to Africa,” she said. “They wouldn’t want to go. They got it too good here.”

“Wouldn’t be what they wanted—if I had anythang to do with it,” the woman said.

“It wouldn’t be a way in the world you could get all the niggers back over there,” Mrs. Turpin said. “They’d be hiding out and lying down and turning sick on you and wailing and hollering and raring and pitching. It wouldn’t be a way in the world to get them over there.”

“They got over here,” the trashy woman said. “Get back like they got over.”

“It wasn’t so many of them then,” Mrs. Turpin explained. The woman looked at Mrs. Turpin as if here was an idiot indeed but

Mrs. Turpin was not bothered by the look, considering where it came from. “Nooo,” she said, “they’re going to stay here where they can go to New

York and marry white folks and improve their color. That’s what they all want to do, every one of them, improve their color.”

“You know what comes of that, don’t you?” Claud asked. “No, Claud, what?” Mrs. Turpin said. Claud’s eyes twinkled. “White-faced niggers,” he said with never a

smile. Everybody in the office laughed except the white-trash and the ugly

girl. The girl gripped the book in her lap with white fingers. The trashy woman looked around her from face to face as if she thought they were all idiots. The old woman in the feed sack dress continued to gaze expression- less across the floor at the hightop shoes of the man opposite her, the one who had been pretending to be asleep when the Turpins came in. He was laughing heartily, his hands still spread out on his knees. The child had fallen to the side and was lying now almost face down in the old woman’s lap.

While they recovered from their laughter, the nasal chorus on the radio kept the room from silence.

“You go to blank blank And I’ll go to mine But we’ll all blank along To-geth-ther,

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And all along the blank We’ll hep each other out Smile-ling in any kind of Weath-ther!”

Mrs. Turpin didn’t catch every word but she caught enough to agree with the spirit of the song and it turned her thoughts sober. To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash or decent. And of all she had to be thankful for, she was most thankful that this was so. If Jesus had said, “You can be high society and have all the money you want and be thin and svelte-like, but you can’t be a good woman with it,” she would have had to say, “Well don’t make me that then. Make me a good woman and it don’t matter what else, how fat or how ugly or how poor!” Her heart rose. He had not made her a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said. Thank you thank you thank you! Whenever she counted her blessings she felt as buoyant as if she weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds instead of one hundred and eighty.

“What’s wrong with your little boy?” the pleasant lady asked the white-trashy woman.

“He has a ulcer,” the woman said proudly. “He ain’t give me a minute’s peace since he was born. Him and her are just alike,” she said, nodding at the old woman, who was running her leathery fingers through the child’s pale hair. “Look like I can’t get nothing down them two but Co’ Cola and candy.”

That’s all you try to get down em, Mrs. Turpin said to herself. Too lazy to light the fire. There was nothing you could tell her about people like them that she didn’t know already. And it was not just that they didn’t have anything. Because if you gave them everything, in two weeks it would all be broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up for lightwood. She knew all this from her own experience. Help them you must, but help them you couldn’t.

All at once the ugly girl turned her lips inside out again. Her eyes were fixed like two drills on Mrs. Turpin. This time there was no mistaking that there was something urgent behind them.

Girl, Mrs. Turpin exclaimed silently, I haven’t done a thing to you! The girl might be confusing her with somebody else. There was no need to sit by and let herself be intimidated. “You must be in college,” she said boldly, looking directly at the girl. “I see you reading a book there.”

The girl continued to stare and pointedly did not answer. Her mother blushed at this rudeness. “The lady asked you a question,

Mary Grace,” she said under her breath.

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“I have ears,” Mary Grace said. The poor mother blushed again. “Mary Grace goes to Wellesley Col-

lege,” she explained. She twisted one of the buttons on her dress. “In Mas- sachusetts,” she added with a grimace. “And in the summer she just keeps right on studying. Just reads all the time, a real book worm. She’s done real well at Wellesley; she’s taking English and Math and History and Psychol- ogy and Social Studies,” she rattled on, “and I think it’s too much. I think she ought to get out and have fun.”

The girl looked as if she would like to hurl them all through the plate glass window.

“Way up north,” Mrs. Turpin murmured and thought, well, it hasn’t done much for her manners.

“I’d almost rather to have him sick,” the white-trash woman said, wrenching the attention back to herself. “He’s so mean when he ain’t. Look like some children just take natural to meanness. It’s some gets bad when they get sick but he was the opposite. Took sick and turned good. He don’t give me no trouble now. It’s me waitin to see the doctor,” she said.

If I was going to send anybody back to Africa, Mrs. Turpin thought, it would be your kind, woman. “Yes, indeed,” she said aloud, but looking up at the ceiling, “it’s a heap of things worse than a nigger.” And dirtier than a hog, she added to herself.

“I think people with bad dispositions are more to be pitied than any- one on earth,” the pleasant lady said in a voice that was decidedly thin.

“I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a good one,” Mrs. Turpin said. “The day has never dawned that I couldn’t find something to laugh at.”

“Not since she married me anyways,” Claud said with a comical straight face.

Everybody laughed except the girl and the white-trash. Mrs. Turpin’s stomach shook. “He’s such a caution,” she said, “that I

can’t help but laugh at him.” The girl made a loud ugly noise through her teeth. Her mother’s mouth grew thin and straight. “I think the worst thing

in the world,” she said, “is an ungrateful person. To have everything and not appreciate it. I know a girl,” she said, “who has parents who would give her anything, a little brother who loves her dearly, who is getting a good education, who wears the best clothes, but who can never say a kind word to anyone, who never smiles, who just criticizes and complains all day long.”

“Is she too old to paddle?” Claud asked. The girl’s face was almost purple. “Yes,” the lady said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing to do but leave her to

her folly. Some day she’ll wake up and it’ll be too late.”

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“It never hurt anyone to smile,” Mrs. Turpin said. “It just makes you feel better all over.”

“Of course,” the lady said sadly, “but there are just some people you can’t tell anything to. They can’t take criticism.”

“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grate- ful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!” For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.

The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howl- ing. The girl’s fingers sank like clamps into the soft flesh of her neck. She heard the mother cry out and Claud shout, “Whoa!” There was an instant when she was certain that she was about to be in an earthquake.

All at once her vision narrowed and she saw everything as if it were happening in a small room far away, or as if she were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. Claud’s face crumpled and fell out of sight. The nurse ran in, then out, then in again. Then the gangling figure of the doctor rushed out of the inner door. Magazines flew this way and that as the table turned over. The girl fell with a thud and Mrs. Turpin’s vision suddenly reversed itself and she saw everything large instead of small. The eyes of the white-trashy woman were staring hugely at the floor. There the girl, held down on one side by the nurse and on the other by her mother, was wrenching and turning in their grasp. The doctor was kneeling astride her, trying to hold her arm down. He managed after a second to sink a long needle into it.

Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh.

“Somebody that’s not busy call for the ambulance,” the doctor said in the off-hand voice young doctors adopt for terrible occasions.

Mrs. Turpin could not have moved a finger. The old man who had been sitting next to her skipped nimbly into the office and made the call, for the secretary still seemed to be gone.

“Claud!” Mrs. Turpin called. He was not in his chair. She knew she must jump up and find him but

she felt like some one trying to catch a train in a dream, when everything moves in slow motion and the faster you try to run the slower you go.

“Here I am,” a suffocated voice, very unlike Claud’s, said.

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He was doubled up in the corner on the floor, pale as paper, holding his leg. She wanted to get up and go to him but she could not move. Instead, her gaze was drawn slowly downward to the churning face on the floor, which she could see over the doctor’s shoulder.

The girl’s eyes stopped rolling and focused on her. They seemed a much lighter blue than before, as if a door that had been tightly closed behind them was now open to admit light and air.

Mrs. Turpin’s head cleared and her power of motion returned. She leaned forward until she was looking directly into the fierce brilliant eyes. There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. “What you got to say to me?” she asked hoarsely and held her breath, wait- ing, as for a revelation.

The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.

Mrs. Turpin sank back in her chair. After a moment the girl’s eyes closed and she turned her head wearily

to the side. The doctor rose and handed the nurse the empty syringe. He leaned

over and put both hands for a moment on the mother’s shoulders, which were shaking. She was sitting on the floor, her lips pressed together, hold- ing Mary Grace’s hand in her lap. The girl’s fingers were gripped like a baby’s around her thumb. “Go on to the hospital,” he said. “I’ll call and make the arrangements.”

“Now let’s see that neck,” he said in a jovial voice to Mrs. Turpin. He began to inspect her neck with his first two fingers. Two little moon- shaped lines like pink fish bones were indented over her windpipe. There was the beginning of an angry red swelling above her eye. His fingers passed over this also.

“Lea’me be,” she said thickly and shook him off. “See about Claud. She kicked him.”

“I’ll see about him in a minute,” he said and felt her pulse. He was a thin gray-haired man, given to pleasantries. “Go home and have yourself a vacation the rest of the day,” he said and patted her on the shoulder.

Quit your pattin me, Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. “And put an ice pack over that eye,” he said. Then he went and squat-

ted down beside Claud and looked at his leg. After a moment he pulled him up and Claud limped after him into the office.

Until the ambulance came, the only sounds in the room were the tremulous moans of the girl’s mother, who continued to sit on the floor.

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The white-trash woman did not take her eyes off the girl. Mrs. Turpin looked straight ahead at nothing. Presently the ambulance drew up, a long dark shadow, behind the curtain. The attendants came in and set the stretcher down beside the girl and lifted her expertly onto it and carried her out. The nurse helped the mother gather up her things. The shadow of the ambulance moved silently away and the nurse came back in the office.

“That ther girl is going to be a lunatic, ain’t she?” the white-trash woman asked the nurse, but the nurse kept on to the back and never answered her.

“Yes, she’s going to be a lunatic,” the white-trash woman said to the rest of them.

“Po’ critter,” the old woman murmured. The child’s face was still in her lap. His eyes looked idly out over her knees. He had not moved during the disturbance except to draw one leg up under him.

“I thank Gawd,” the white-trash woman said fervently, “I ain’t a lunatic.”

Claud came limping out and the Turpins went home. As their pick-up truck turned into their own dirt road and made

the crest of the hill, Mrs. Turpin gripped the window ledge and looked out suspiciously. The land sloped gracefully down through a field dotted with lavender weeds and at the start of the rise their small yellow frame house, with its little flower beds spread out around it like a fancy apron, sat primly in its accustomed place between two giant hickory trees. She would not have been startled to see a burnt wound between two blackened chimneys.

Neither of them felt like eating so they put on their house clothes and lowered the shade in the bedroom and lay down, Claud with his leg on a pillow and herself with a damp washcloth over her eye. The instant she was flat on her back, the image of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face and horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her head. She moaned, a low quiet moan.

“I am not,” she said tearfully, “a wart hog. From hell.” But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hardworking, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.

She rose on her elbow and the washcloth fell into her hand. Claud was lying on his back, snoring. She wanted to tell him what the girl had said.

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At the same time, she did not wish to put the image of herself as a wart hog from hell into his mind.

“Hey, Claud,” she muttered and pushed his shoulder. Claud opened one pale baby blue eye. She looked into it warily. He did not think about anything. He just

went his way. “Wha, whasit?” he said and closed the eye again. “Nothing,” she said. “Does your leg pain you?” “Hurts like hell,” Claud said. “It’ll quit terreckly,” she said and lay back down. In a moment Claud was

snoring again. For the rest of the afternoon they lay there. Claud slept. She scowled at the ceiling. Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stab- bing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.

About five-thirty Claud stirred. “Got to go after those niggers,” he sighed, not moving.

She was looking straight up as if there were unintelligible handwriting on the ceiling. The protuberance over her eye had turned a greenish-blue. “Listen here,” she said.

“What?” “Kiss me.” Claud leaned over and kissed her loudly on the mouth. He pinched her

side and their hands interlocked. Her expression of ferocious concentration did not change. Claud got up, groaning and growling, and limped off. She continued to study the ceiling.

She did not get up until she heard the pick-up truck coming back with the Negroes. Then she rose and thrust her feet in her brown oxfords, which she did not bother to lace, and stumped out onto the back porch and got her red plastic bucket. She emptied a tray of ice cubes into it and filled it half full of water and went out into the back yard. Every afternoon after Claud brought the hands in, one of the boys helped him put out hay and the rest waited in the back of the truck until he was ready to take them home. The truck was parked in the shade under one of the hickory trees.

“Hi yawl this evening?” Mrs. Turpin asked grimly, appearing with the bucket and the dipper. There were three women and a boy in the truck.

“Us doin nicely,” the oldest woman said. “Hi you doin?” and her gaze stuck immediately on the dark lump on Mrs. Turpin’s forehead. “You done fell down, ain’t you?” she asked in a solicitous voice. The old woman was dark and almost toothless. She had on an old felt hat of Claud’s set back on her head. The other two women were younger and lighter and they both had new bright green sun hats. One of them had hers on her head; the other had taken hers off and the boy was grinning beneath it.

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Mrs. Turpin set the bucket down on the floor of the truck. “Yawl hep yourselves,” she said. She looked around to make sure Claud had gone. “No. I didn’t fall down,” she said, folding her arms. “It was something worse than that.”

“Ain’t nothing bad happen to you!” the old woman said. She said it as if they all knew Mrs. Turpin was protected in some special way by Divine Providence. “You just had you a little fall.”

“We were in town at the doctor’s office for where the cow kicked Mr. Turpin,” Mrs. Turpin said in a flat tone that indicated they could leave off their foolishness. “And there was this girl there. A big fat girl with her face all broke out. I could look at that girl and tell she was peculiar but I couldn’t tell how. And me and her mama were just talking and going along and all of a sudden WHAM! She throws this big book she reading at me and . . .”

“Naw!” the old woman cried out. “And then she jumps over the table and commences to choke me.” “Naw!” they all exclaimed, “naw!” “Hi come she do that?” the old woman asked. “What ail her?” Mrs. Turpin only glared in front of her. “Somethin ail her,” the old woman said. “They carried her off in an ambulance,” Mrs. Turpin continued, “but

before she went she was rolling on the floor and they were trying to hold her down to give her a shot and she said something to me.” She paused. “You know what she said to me?”

“What she say?” they asked. “She said,” Mrs. Turpin began, and stopped, her face very dark and

heavy. The sun was getting whiter and whiter, blanching the sky overhead so that the leaves of the hickory tree were black in the face of it. She could not bring forth the words. “Something real ugly,” she muttered.

“She sho shouldn’t said nothin ugly to you,” the old woman said. “You so sweet. You the sweetest lady I know.”

“She pretty too,” the one with the hat on said. “And stout,” the other one said. “I never knowed no sweeter white

lady.” “That’s the truth befo’ Jesus,” the old woman said. “Amen! You des as

sweet and pretty as you can be.” Mrs. Turpin knew just exactly how much Negro flattery was worth

and it added to her rage. “She said,” she began again and finished this time with a fierce rush of breath, “that I was an old wart hog from hell.”

There was an astounded silence. “Where she at?” the youngest woman cried in a piercing voice. “Lemme see her. I’ll kill her!”

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“I’ll kill her with you!” the other one cried. “She b’long in the sylum,” the old woman said emphatically. “You the

sweetest white lady I know.” “She pretty too,” the other two said. “Stout as she can be and sweet.

Jesus satisfied with her!” “Deed he is,” the old woman declared. Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. You could never say anything

intelligent to a nigger. You could talk at them but not with them. “Yawl ain’t drunk your water,” she said shortly. “Leave the bucket in the truck when you’re finished with it. I got more to do than just stand around and pass the time of day,” and she moved off and into the house.

She stood for a moment in the middle of the kitchen. The dark pro- tuberance over her eye looked like a miniature tornado cloud which might any moment sweep across the horizon of her brow. Her lower lip protruded dangerously. She squared her massive shoulders. Then she marched into the front of the house and out the side door and started down the road to the pig parlor. She had the look of a woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle.

The sun was a deep yellow now like a harvest moon and was riding westward very fast over the far tree line as if it meant to reach the hogs before she did. The road was rutted and she kicked several good-sized stones out of her path as she strode along. The pig parlor was on a little knoll at the end of a lane that ran off from the side of the barn. It was a square of concrete as large as a small room, with a board fence about four feet high around it. The concrete floor sloped slightly so that the hog wash could drain off into a trench where it was carried to the field for fertilizer. Claud was standing on the outside, on the edge of the concrete, hanging onto the top board, hosing down the floor inside. The hose was connected to the faucet of a water trough nearby.

Mrs. Turpin climbed up beside him and glowered down at the hogs inside. There were seven long-snouted bristly shoats in it—tan with liver- colored spots—and an old sow a few weeks off from farrowing. She was lying on her side grunting. The shoats were running about shaking themselves like idiot children, their little slit pig eyes searching the floor for anything left. She had read that pigs were the most intelligent animal. She doubted it. They were supposed to be smarter than dogs. There had even been a pig astronaut. He had performed his assignment perfectly but died of a heart attack afterwards because they left him in his electric suit, sitting upright throughout his examination when naturally a hog should be on all fours.

A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin. “Gimme that hose,” she said, yanking it away from Claud. “Go on and

carry them niggers home and then get off that leg.”

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“You look like you might have swallowed a mad dog,” Claud observed, but he got down and limped off. He paid no attention to her humors.

Until he was out of earshot, Mrs. Turpin stood on the side of the pen, holding the hose and pointing the stream of water at the hind quarters of any shoat that looked as if it might try to lie down. When he had had time to get over the hill, she turned her head slightly and her wrathful eyes scanned the path. He was nowhere in sight. She turned back again and seemed to gather herself up. Her shoulders rose and she drew in her breath.

“What do you send me a message like that for?” she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concen- trated fury. “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.

The pig parlor commanded a view of the back pasture where their twenty beef cows were gathered around the hay-bales Claud and the boy had put out. The freshly cut pasture sloped down to the highway. Across it was their cotton field and beyond that a dark green dusty wood which they owned as well. The sun was behind the wood, very red, looking over the paling of trees like a farmer inspecting his own hogs.

“Why me?” she rumbled. “It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.”

She appeared to be the right size woman to command the arena before her. “How am I a hog?” she demanded. “Exactly how am I like them?” and she jabbed the stream of water at the shoats. “There was plenty of trash there. It didn’t have to be me.”

“If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then,” she railed. “You could have made me trash. Or a nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. “I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy,” she growled. “Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer. Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face. I could be nasty.

“Or you could have made me a nigger. It’s too late for me to be a nig- ger,” she said with deep sarcasm, “but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground.”

In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious hue. The pasture was growing a peculiar glassy green and the streak of highway had turned lavender. She braced herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. “Go on,” she yelled, “call me a hog! Call

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me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!”

A garbled echo returned to her. A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think

you are?” The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment

with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it. A tiny truck, Claud’s, appeared on the highway, heading rapidly out of

sight. Its gears scraped thinly. It looked like a child’s toy. At any moment a bigger truck might smash into it and scatter Claud’s and the niggers’ brains all over the road.

Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.

Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white- trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

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At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invis- ible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Describe the characterization of Mrs. Turpin as she is presented in the opening scene that takes place in the doctor’s waiting room. Is she a likable or unlikable character, or is she a mixture of both?

2. Mary Grace in the same scene is sometimes compared to the character Joy-Hulga in “Good Country People.” What similarities do you see? Do some reading about Flannery O’Connor online: in what ways could the characters be seen as partial biographical portraits of the author?

3. Discuss the following relationships in the O’Connor stories presented in this section: the Grandmother and The Misfit; Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter, Joy- Hulga; Mrs. Turpin and Mary Grace. In what ways are the relationships similar? How do they differ?

4. Describe the effect on Mrs. Turpin when Mary Grace calls her a “wart-hog from hell.” Apart from its force as an insult, why does it upset her so much? How does it disturb her view of human society?

5. Focus on the last sentence. What kind of epiphany is Mrs. Turpin having here? Is this a positive or a negative experience for her?

Critical Perspectives on O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”*

Much of my fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the

unreasonable, though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be

apparent. The assumptions that underlie this use of it, however, are those of

the central Christian mysteries. These are assumptions to which a large part of

the modern audience takes exception. About this I can only say that there are

perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read, but none

other by which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the

engine that makes perception operate.

The heroine of this story [“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”], the Grandmother,

is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death.

*From Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, 1969), 109–114, discussing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it.

She would like to see the event postponed. Indefinitely.

I’ve talked to a number of teachers who use this story in class and who

tell their students that the Grandmother is evil, that in fact, she’s a witch,

even down to the cat. One of these teachers told me that his students, and

particularly his Southern students, resisted this interpretation with a certain

bemused vigor, and he didn’t understand why. I had to tell him that they

resisted it because they all had grandmothers or great aunts just like her

at home, and they knew, from personal experience, that the old lady lacked

comprehension, but that she had a good heart. The Southerner is usually

tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence, and he knows that

a taste for self-preservation can be readily combined with the missionary spirit.

This same teacher was telling his students that morally the Misfit was

several cuts above the Grandmother. He had a really sentimental attachment

to the Misfit. But then a prophet gone wrong is almost always more interesting

than your grandmother, and you have to let people take their pleasures where

they find them.

It is true that the old lady is a hypocritical old soul; her wits are no

match for the Misfit’s, nor is her capacity for grace equal to his; yet I think

the unprejudiced reader will feel that the Grandmother has a special kind of

triumph in this story which instinctively we do not allow to someone altogether

bad.

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up

as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of

a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the

real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which

was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was

both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world

and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the

anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our

participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that

might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It

would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

There is a point in this story [paragraph 136] where such a gesture

occurs. The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for

an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for

O’CONNOR / A REASONABLE USE OF THE UNREASONABLE 487

488 FICTION / THREE FEATURED WRITERS

the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots

deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this

point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.

I find that students are often puzzled by what she says and does here, but

I think myself that if I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would

have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention. Our age not

only does not have a very sharp eye for the at most imperceptible intrusions

of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which

precede and follow them. The devil’s greatest wile, Baudelaire has said, is to

convince us that he does not exist.

I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction

will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that

violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing

them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost

nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we

must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the

casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.

I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that,

however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard seed,

will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough

of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become.

But that’s another story.

This story has been called grotesque, but I prefer to call it literal. A good

story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child

draws, he doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and

as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of

motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual

motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the

action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.

We hear many complaints about the prevalence of violence in modern

fiction, and it is always assumed that this violence is a bad thing and meant to

be an end in itself. With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It

is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially, and I believe

these are times when writers are more interested in what we are essentially

than in the tenor of our daily lives. Violence is a force which can be used for

good or evil, and among other things taken by it is the kingdom of heaven. But

regardless of what can be taken by it, the man in the violent situation reveals

those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are

all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this

story are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take

with them. In any case, I hope that if you consider these points in connection

with the story, you will come to see it as something more than an account of a

family murdered on the way to Florida.

Flannery O’Connor “Letter to a Professor of English”*

A professor of English had sent Flannery the following letter: “I am writing

as spokesman for three members of our department and some ninety university

students in three classes who for a week now have been discussing your story

‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ We have debated at length several possible

interpretations, none of which fully satisfies us. In general we believe that the

appearance of the Misfit is not ‘real’ in the same sense that the incidents of the

first half of the story are real. Bailey, we believe, imagines the appearance of the

Misfit, whose activities have been called to his attention on the night before the

trip and again during the stopover at the roadside restaurant. Bailey, we further

believe, identifies himself with the Misfit and so plays two roles in the imaginary

last half of the story. But we cannot, after great effort, determine the point at

which reality fades into illusion or reverie. Does the accident literally occur, or

is it a part of Bailey’s dream? Please believe me when I say we are not seeking

an easy way out of our difficulty. We admire your story and have examined it

with great care, but we are convinced that we are missing something important

which you intended for us to grasp. We will all be very grateful if you comment

on the interpretation which I have outlined above and if you will give us further

comments about your intention in writing ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ ”

She replied:

To a Professor of English

28 March 61

The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic

and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate

interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would

be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology.

*From The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, 1979), 436–437.

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490 FICTION / THREE FEATURED WRITERS

There is a change of tension from the first part of the story to the second

where the Misfit enters, but this is no lessening of reality. This story is, of

course, not meant to be realistic in the sense that it portrays the everyday

doings of people in Georgia. It is stylized and its conventions are comic even

though its meaning is serious.

Bailey’s only importance is as the Grandmother’s boy and the driver of

the car. It is the Grandmother who first recognizes the Misfit and who is most

concerned with him throughout. The story is a duel of sorts between the

Grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit’s more profoundly felt

involvement with Christ’s action which set the world off balance for him.

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he

thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers

are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for

which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students

will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than

too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.

Madison Jones From “A Good Man’s Predicament”*

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” has been for the past

decade or more a subject of virtually countless critical readings. . . .

Much has been made of O’Connor’s use of the grotesque, and the

vacationing family in “A Good Man” is a case in point. The family members are

portrayed almost exclusively in terms of their vices, so much so, it would seem,

as to put them at risk of losing entirely not only the reader’s sympathy but even

his recognition of them as representatively human—a result certain to drain

the story of most of its meaning and power. Such is not the result, however.

What otherwise must prompt severity in the reader’s response is mitigated

here by laughter, the transforming element through which human evil is seen

in the more tolerable aspect of folly. The author laughs and so do we, and the

moral grossness of the family becomes funny to us. This is what engages and

sustains our interest in them and, through the effect of distance that humor

creates, makes possible our perception of their representative character.

*In The Southern Review 20 (1984): 836–841.

What we see portrayed is increasingly recognizable. Here embodied in

this family are standard evils of our culture. Indeed the term “family” is itself a

misnomer, for there is no uniting bond. It is each for himself, without respect,

without manners. The children, uncorrected, crudely insult their grandmother,

and the grandmother for her own selfish ends uses the children against her

surly son. The practice of deceit and the mouthing of pietisms are constants in

her life, and her praise of the past when good men were easy to find degrades