text
stringlengths 2.84k
41.9k
| tokenized_length
int64 652
9.2k
|
|---|---|
- Genre: Novel / Satire / Parable
- Title: 1984
- Point of view: Third-Person Limited
- Setting: London in the year 1984
- Character: Winston Smith. Description: The protagonist of the novel, a 39-year-old Outer Party functionary who privately rebels against the Party's totalitarian rule. Frail, intellectual, and fatalistic, Winston works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth rewriting news articles to conform with the Party's current version of history. Winston perceives that the Party's ultimate goal is to gain absolute mastery over the citizens of Oceania by controlling access to the past and—more diabolically—controlling the minds of its subjects. Orwell uses Winston's habit of introspection and self-analysis to explore the opposition between external and internal reality, and between individualism and collective identity. Convinced that he cannot escape punishment for his disloyalty, Winston nonetheless seeks to understand the motives behind the Party's oppressive policies, and takes considerable personal risks not only to experience forbidden feelings and relationships but to contact others who share his skepticism and desire to rebel against Ingsoc (English Socialism).
- Character: Julia/The Dark-Haired Girl. Description: Winston's dark-haired, sexually rebellious 26-year-old lover, who works in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Julia is opportunistic, practical, intellectually primitive, vital, and uninterested in politics. She believes that the Party is unconquerable through organized resistance, and that secret disobedience is the only effective form of revolt. She delights in breaking the rules, and her cunning and courageousness inspires Winston to take greater and greater risks. Julia disguises her illegal activities beneath an appearance of orthodoxy. For instance, she is an active member of the Junior Anti-Sex League.
- Character: O'Brien. Description: The antagonist of the novel—a corrupt bureaucrat, member of the Inner Party, and symbol of dehumanizing and dehumanized despotism. O'Brien's charismatic appearance and manners fool Winston into believing that he too is working against the Party, leading Winston to incriminate himself. Even after O'Brien reveals himself to be the Party's instrument of terror, Winston continues to admire his intelligence, and under torture comes paradoxically to worship him as his savior.
- Character: Mr. Charrington. Description: The elderly owner of the junk shop where Winston buys the diary, then the paperweight, and eventually rents a private bedroom for his trysts with Julia. Charrington induces Winston to trust him with his apparent reverence for the past, discreet behavior, and mild-mannered exterior. Actually a member of the Thought Police, Charrington ensures that the lovers are arrested.
- Theme: Totalitarianism and Communism. Description: Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, not as a prediction of actual future events, but to warn the world against what he feared would be the fate of humanity if totalitarian regimes were allowed to seize power as they had done recently in Germany under Hitler and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In the aftermath of World War II, Anglo-American intellectuals were reluctant to criticize the Soviet regime, despite evidence of Stalin's despotism, because Russia had been an ally against Germany and Japan. Orwell, who witnessed firsthand the Soviet-backed Communists' brutal suppression of rival political groups during the Spanish Civil War, returned from the war an outspoken critic of Communism. For the rest of his life he worked tirelessly to expose the evils of totalitarianism and to promote what he called "democratic socialism." To reviewers who wished to see his book as a critique of Soviet Communism, Orwell maintained that he had set the book in Britain in order to show that totalitarianism could succeed anywhere if it were not fought against. In the novel, INGSOC represents the worst features of both the Nazi and Communist regimes. The Party's ultimate ambition is to control the minds as well as the bodies of its citizenry, and thus control reality itself. Totalitarianism was an outgrowth of Socialism, which arose as a response to industrialization, and sought to create more equitable societies by centralizing production and abolishing private property in favor of collective ownership. Emmanuel Goldstein's book, parts of which Winston reads in Book II, outlines the methods by which a totalitarian regime consolidates and extends its power.
- Theme: The Individual vs. Collective Identity. Description: One way a totalitarian regime seeks to stay in power is by denying human beings their individuality, eradicating independent thought through the use of propaganda and terror. Throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston tries to assert his individual nature against the collective identity the Party wishes him to adopt. He keeps a private diary, engages in a forbidden sexual relationship, and insists that his version of reality is the truth, as opposed to what the Party says it is. Instead of going to the Community Center or participating in social groups, he wanders the prole neighborhoods alone and seeks solitude in his apartment, engaging in behavior the Party calls ownlife and considers dangerous. After Winston is caught, the seven years of torture to which O'Brien subjects him are designed to destroy Winston's ability to think unorthodox thoughts. Before he enters Room 101, Winston is able to see that to die hating the Party is freedom, but by the end of the novel he is no longer capable of this. In order to save himself from O'Brien's rats, Winston does the one thing he can never forgive himself for—he betrays Julia and in doing so relinquishes his own morality and self-respect.
- Theme: Reality Control. Description: The Party controls the citizens of Oceania through a combination of surveillance, terror, and propaganda. Although there are no laws to punish crime, the party can indiscriminately use torture, imprisonment, or vaporization on anyone whose thoughts or actions indicate that they may commit a crime in the future. The presence of telescreens in every room reminds citizens that they are constantly being observed, and all live in fear that their neighbors, coworkers, or even family members will report them to the Thought Police. Another way the Party controls the minds of the people is by destroying historical evidence that contradicts what the Party wishes the people to believe: for instance, when the Party reduces the chocolate ration, it also eliminates any information that would make it possible for anyone to verify that the chocolate ration had once been larger. Winston and his fellow employees in the Records Department are given the task of rewriting news articles and other literature in order to bring the written record into compliance with the version of history supported by the Party, a never ending job, since the Party constantly changes facts in order to support its policies. Books that describe the past in a way that does not conform with Party ideology are destroyed or translated into Newspeak, a form of English designed by the Party to lack words that are considered unnecessary or dangerous, and which thereby prevents revolutionary thoughts.
- Theme: Sex, Love, and Loyalty. Description: As Julia observes, the Party polices sexual relationships because it realizes that the hysteria caused by sexual frustration can be harnessed into war fever and leader-worship. Because of this, when Winston and Julia make love they think of it as a political act, "a blow struck against the Party." The sadistic fantasies Winston has about Julia before they begin their affair indicate the strong link between sexual repression and violence. The red sash Julia wears and her voluptuous appearance arouses feelings of hatred and resentment that only dissipate when he learns that he can possess her physically.Another reason that the Party restricts sexual behavior is that sexual desire competes with loyalty to the State: after Winston makes love with Julia, he realizes that it is "the force that would tear the Party to pieces." In place of heterosexual love, the Party substitutes leader-worship and patriotic feeling: thus, when Winston betrays Julia under torture, he learns to revere O'Brien and worship Big Brother.
- Theme: Class Struggle. Description: In Nineteen Eighty-Four, society is made up of three distinct social classes: the elite Inner Party, the industrious Outer Party, and vast numbers of uneducated proles. When Winston reads Goldstein's book, he learns that the history of humankind has been a cyclical struggle between competing social groups: the High, the Middle, and the Low. This theory was originated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century and became known as Marxism. Marxists believe that the aim of the Middle group is to change places with the High, which they do by enlisting the support of the Low group. After the Middle group seizes power in a revolution, they become the High and thrust the Low back into servitude. Eventually a new Middle group splits off and the cycle begins again. At various points in the narrative, Winston entertains the hope that the proles will become conscious of their oppressed state and initiate a revolution. At other times, he despairs that since the proles cannot rebel until they become conscious, and cannot become conscious until only after they have rebelled, such a development is extremely unlikely.
- Climax: Winston is tortured in Room 101
- Summary: In the future world of 1984, the world is divided up into three superstates—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—that are deadlocked in a permanent war. The superpowers are so evenly matched that a decisive victory is impossible, but the real reason for the war is to keep their economies productive without adding to the wealth of their citizens, who live (with the exception of a privileged few) in a state of fear and poverty. Oceania, made up of the English-speaking nations, is ruled by a group known simply as the Party, a despotic oligarchical collective that is ideologically very similar to the regimes in power in the other two superstates, though each claims that their system is superior to the others. The Inner Party, whose members make up 2% of the population, effectively govern, while the Outer Party, who number about 13% of the population, unquestioningly carry out their orders. The remaining 85% of the population are proles, who are largely ignored because they are judged intellectually incapable of organized revolt. In order to maintain its power, the Party keeps its citizens under constant surveillance, monitoring even their thoughts, and arresting and "vaporizing" individuals if they show signs of discontent or nonconformity. The Party's figurehead is Big Brother, whose mustachioed face is displayed on posters and coins, and toward whom every citizen is compelled to feel love and allegiance. Organized hate rallies keep patriotism at a fever pitch, and public executions of prisoners of war increase support for the regime and for the war itself.Winston Smith, a quiet, frail Outer Party member who lives alone in a one-room flat in a squalid apartment complex called Victory Mansions, is disturbed by the Party's willingness to alter history in order to present its regime as infallible and just. A gifted writer whose job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite news articles in order to make them comply with Party ideology, Winston begins keeping a diary, an activity which is not illegal, since there are no laws in Oceania, but which he knows is punishable by death. Since every room is outfitted with a telescreen that can both transmit and receive sounds and images, Winston must be extremely careful to disguise his subversive activities. He imagines he is writing the diary to O'Brien, a charismatic Inner Party bureaucrat whom Winston believes is a member of a fabled underground counterrevolutionary organization known as the Brotherhood. Winston is also writing in order to stay sane, because the Party controls reality to the extent of requiring its subjects to deny the evidence of their own senses, a practice known as doublethink, and Winston knows of no one else who shares his feelings of loathing and outrage.One day at work, a dark-haired girl whom Winston mistakenly suspects of being a spy for the Thought Police, an organization that hunts out and punishes unorthodox thinking (known as thoughtcrime), slips him a note that says "I love you." At first, Winston is terrified—in Oceania, individual relationships are prohibited and sexual desire forbidden even to married couples. However, he finds the courage to talk to the girl, whose name is Julia, and they begin an illicit love affair, meeting first in the countryside, then in the crowded streets, and then regularly in a room without a telescreen above the secondhand store where Winston bought his diary. The proprietor, Mr. Charrington, seems trustworthy, and Winston believes that he, too, is an ally because of his apparent respect for the past—a past that the Party has tried hard to eradicate by altering and destroying historical records in order to make sure that the people of Oceania never realize that they are actually worse off than their ancestors who lived before the Revolution.Meanwhile, the lovers are being led into a trap. O'Brien, who is actually loyal to the Party, dupes them into believing he is a counterrevolutionary and lends them a book that was supposedly written by the exiled Emmanuel Goldstein, a former Party leader who has been denounced as a traitor, and which O'Brien says will initiate them into the Brotherhood. One night, the lovers are arrested in their hiding place with the incriminating book in their possession, and they learn that Mr. Charrington has all along been a member of the Thought Police.Winston and Julia are tortured and brainwashed by O'Brien in the Ministry of Love. During the torture in the dreaded room 101, Winston and Julia betray one another, and in the process lose their self-respect, individuality and sexual desire. They are then released, separately, to live out their broken lives as loyal Party members. In the closing scene, Winston, whose experiences have turned him into an alcoholic, gazes adoringly at a portrait of Big Brother, whom he has at last learned to love. | 3,263 |
- Genre: realism, regionalism, micro-fiction
- Title: 55 Miles to the Gas Pump
- Point of view: omniscient 3rd person
- Setting: a ranch in rural Wyoming
- Character: Rancher Croom. Description: Rancher Croom is Mrs. Croom's husband, a cattleman on a rural Wyoming farm who is described initially as a "warm-handed, quick-foot dancer" who brews his own beer. However, this pleasant, unassuming description is at odds with both his violent suicide—a leap from a nearby cliff—and the revelation that he is a serial killer of women who stores corpses in his attic and uses them sexually. He is powerful, brutal, and almost animal in certain moments—"parting the air with his last roar" when he jumps from the cliff—but, although the reader learns little about his inner life, his suicide suggests a more complex emotional experience than is apparent from Proulx's description. In Proulx's loose retelling of the "Bluebeard" folktale, he is the Bluebeard figure, killing women without reason, forbidding his wife to enter the room full of bodies, and ultimately suffering a deadly fate.
- Character: Mrs. Croom. Description: Mrs. Croom is the wife of Rancher Croom. They live alone on their Wyoming farm, which is very remote, and, after her husband's death, Mrs. Croom discovers the bodies of other women he has been storing in the attic. Mrs. Croom is analogous to the heroine of "Bluebeard," a folktale in which a young wife enters a forbidden room, finds the corpses of her husband's victims, and is able to escape from and punish him when he attempts to kill her. However, in "55 Miles to the Gas Pump," Mrs. Croom is less innocent and heroic. Proulx implies that she has been aware of her husband's killings for some time (when she discovers the bodies her response is "just as she thought"), and, in not informing the police or making any effort to exact justice for his crimes, she has become complicit in them. Moreover, she seems to be fascinated by the bodies: her feelings about the corpses are described as "desire," and her description of the bodies is not condemnatory, but fascinating and even provocative.
- Theme: Isolation and Rural Life. Description: The title of Annie Proulx's "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" introduces the story's primary theme: the isolation of rural life and the impact it has on people's sanity. In this three-paragraph work of microfiction, Rancher Croom kills himself by jumping from a cliff, and then his wife, Mrs. Croom, discovers the bodies of dead women—his victims and "paramours"—in their attic. By emphasizing the couple's solitude and the absence of law and society in the rural landscape, Proulx suggests that it is the Crooms' isolation that drives their immorality—and that anyone in their position would do the same. In the first of the story's three paragraphs, Proulx establishes Rancher Croom's seclusion, giving the reader a sense of how isolation affects his behavior. She describes Rancher Croom as a "walleyed cattleman" in "[a] filthy hat" and with "stray hairs," suggesting a person in a lonely, rural setting who has no need to concern himself with how other people might see him. Two key details—Croom's "handmade boots" and "bottles of his own strange beer"—tell the reader the extent of his isolation: his ranch is so far from a town or a city, and so difficult to get to, that he makes his own beer and boots rather than buying them. The fact that Proulx describes the beer as "strange" is the reader's first indication that something about this man's rural life is mysterious, uncanny, and possibly wrong. The reader then learns exactly how strange and twisted Croom's rural life is when he dies by suicide, after "galloping drunk over the dark plain," "turning off … at a canyon brink," and "[looking] down on tumbled rock" before he "steps out." His death is associated with the loneliness and danger of the rural Wyoming landscape, which he uses as a weapon against himself. Proulx's suggestion to the reader is clear: the landscape was not only the physical cause of Rancher Croom's death (landing on the rocks), but also the emotional cause of his suicidal mentality. In the second paragraph, when Mrs. Croom cuts into the attic of their farmhouse to find the corpses of women her husband has killed, Proulx demonstrates that isolation has made this couple monstrous. The impact of social and geographic isolation on Mrs. Croom is more subtle than on her husband, but it's still clear that isolation affects her. For instance, the reader learns that "she has not been [in the attic] for twelve years thanks to old Croom's padlocks and warnings"—she has obeyed her husband and accepted whatever frightening secret he is keeping, perhaps because she has nowhere to go and no one to rely on within their solitary and distant life, except him. Furthermore, when she discovers the corpses in the attic, Proulx indicates that they do not come as a shock to her—instead, they are "just as she thought." She has known or suspected that her husband has been killing women and allowed it to continue, which demonstrates the lack of morality that her distance from "civilized" people and behavior has produced. The visual details of this paragraph also emphasize the risks of rural life and the ways in which isolation enables violence and secrecy. Mrs. Croom "recognizes [the corpses] from their photographs in the paper," implying that people made an effort to search for the missing women and were unsuccessful—perhaps because the Croom ranch is so far away from civilization that there would be no one nearby to notice anything amiss. Similarly, the corpses are "desiccated as jerky" and "bright blue with … paint used on the shutters years ago," indicating to the reader that Rancher Croom has been killing for a long time without being noticed or caught. Rancher Croom and his wife strike the reader initially as outliers and outcasts, as dangerous and remote as the landscape where they live. In other words, they seem fundamentally different from the kinds of people who live and participate in urbanized society and adhere to a moral code. However, the use of "you" in the final sentence ("When you live a long way out you make your own fun") groups the reader collectively with the couple, implying that anyone who is living a long way out and isolated from society might come to "make their own fun"—or disregard the law and commit similar acts of horror. To Proulx, this couple is not unique; all of us, left wholly to ourselves, have the potential to lose our humanity.
- Theme: Violence, Pleasure, and Desire. Description: Violence and destruction pervade "55 Miles to the Gas Pump," from major events (such as Rancher Croom's suicide) to atmospheric details, like the descriptions of "splintery boards." Throughout the story, however, Proulx associates violence more with pleasure than with pain or horror—her descriptions of Rancher Croom's murder victims are sensual, Rancher Croom's suicide seems almost joyful, and, of course, the story's final line suggests that violence is a kind of "fun." Proulx's evocative descriptions put readers in the position of enjoying the story's grisly acts (suicide, murder, and necrophilia), which mirrors the pleasure that the Crooms take in violence. By leading the reader to have fun with descriptions of violence, Proulx suggests that all people—not just the Crooms—have a latent capacity to take pleasure in things we find morally horrific. In the first paragraph of the story, Proulx describes Rancher Croom—a suicidal serial killer—in joyful terms. The reader is first introduced to Croom as a "warm-handed, quick-foot dancer" with "stray hairs like the curling fiddle string ends" whose homemade beer "[bursts] out in garlands of foam." This warm, pleasant language evokes an event like a party, with music, dancing, and decoration. In addition, far from expressing fear or even resignation at the prospect of suicide, Rancher Croom approaches it eagerly and forcefully, "galloping" to the canyon brink and waiting only a moment before "[stepping] out," which implies that violence and death are not only routine for him (needing no hesitation) but also perhaps enjoyable. Furthermore, after he jumps, Proulx describes him with language that evokes buoyancy and lightness ("parting the air," "surging up," and "windmill arms"). These descriptions seem at odds with the severity of the situation, evoking joy and vibrant energy instead of describing suicide as a violent death of despair. The conclusion of the paragraph—"before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk"—underscores this odd juxtaposition between pleasure and violent death. The notion of him rising again after jumping to his death is reminiscent of a carnival ride, where he might simply be able to jump and rise again and again without consequence. The story's second paragraph blends pleasure and violence even more explicitly, both through the revelation of Rancher Croom's necrophilia and through the sexualized language surrounding Mrs. Croom's discovery of the bodies. This combination of violence and desire is most literal when Rancher Croom's necrophilia is spelled out: the bodies of the women he has murdered and hidden in the attic are "used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels." It is clear that Croom has been abusing these corpses for years, which the reader will presumably find disturbing. Mrs. Croom, however, does not seem particularly disturbed by it—in fact, her experience of discovering the corpses seems to be one of pleasure more than of fear or revulsion. Proulx describes Mr. Croom's "padlocks and warnings," which have kept Mrs. Croom out of the attic until now, as "whets to her desire." The most straightforward reading of this phrasing suggests that her husband's secrecy only makes her more eager to know what's in the attic, but given the context of Rancher Croom's own necrophilia and the implication that Mrs. Croom already knew what was going on, Proulx implies that Mrs. Croom might also get a sexual thrill from the corpses. This interpretation gains traction later in the paragraph with the sexualized language that describes a corpse as wrapped in newspaper from "nipple to knee," a deliberately provocative choice (as opposed to a more neutral word like "chest"). Furthermore, the fact that Mrs. Croom "recognizes the corpses from their photographs in the paper" might also be suggestive—how long would she have needed to look at those photographs to recognize the women, particularly as decomposed as they are? The final sentence of the story—"When you live a long way out you make your own fun"—efficiently sums up what Proulx has suggested throughout the previous two paragraphs: that Mr. and Mrs. Croom seek out and revel in violence, cruelty, and destruction, finding pleasure in it that is both emotional and sexual. While the reader is likely disturbed by the final sentence, Proulx's sensuous depiction of violence throughout the story makes familiar the notion that violence is fun—after all, she has encouraged readers to appreciate her depictions of Rancher Croom rising "like a cork in a bucket of milk" after he jumps to his death, or in the "bright blue" paint covering some of the corpses. To read the final line after having taken some pleasure in the story's grisly descriptions undermines the reader's ability to judge the Crooms. While one might not want to take pleasure in violence, the story demonstrates that it's uncomfortably easy to do so.
- Theme: Good, Evil, and Morality. Description: "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" is a loose retelling of the folktale "Bluebeard," which begins when the heroine's new husband forbids her to enter a certain room in his house. While he's away, she enters the forbidden room and discovers the mutilated corpses of his previous six wives, after which she or one of her relatives (depending on the tale) usually kills him. Though "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" preserves the format of a folktale (brief, action-focused, ending with a pithy "moral"), it deliberately subverts the black-and-white morality that readers expect from folktales. Instead of judging and punishing the murderous, necrophiliac, and suicidal Crooms (and thereby upholding conventional morality), Proulx suggests that good and evil are inextricable, and that the simplistic morality of folktales is a lie. By conventional moral standards, Rancher Croom is the story's villain; after all, he is the analogue to Bluebeard. However, Proulx defies the folktale convention that Croom's death will be a punishment for his sins. First of all, his suicide occurs at the beginning of the story, before the "big reveal" of the corpses in the attic. Since readers haven't yet learned about the corpses, they will initially interpret his death as irrational and inexplicable, rather than a product of remorse for his behavior or some kind of karmic punishment. Because he is already dead once the reader discovers his crimes, his death cannot follow the discovery in order to neatly conclude the story by demonstrating that villains always get their just desserts. Indeed, rather than Rancher Croom meeting the gory, violent fate of many folktale villains, his suicide ends with him "[rising] again like a cork in a bucket of milk." This comic, oddly triumphant description means that his death, far from being a punishment for his behavior, strikes the reader as more similar to a resurrection—a Christlike fate associated with heroes, not villains. Combining this with the fact that the violence and brutality of Croom's death is deliberately downplayed (the details are cartoonish: "windmill arms, jeans riding over boot tops"), the reader feels that Rancher Croom's death is unserious and triumphant, rather than tragic or deserved. In this context, it's difficult for the reader to derive any moral significance from the suicide at all. Just as Proulx doesn't depict Rancher Croom as a classic folktale villain, she refuses to make Mrs. Croom the heroine. In traditional renderings of "Bluebeard," the wife is kind, heroic, and eventually rewarded for her virtue, but Mrs. Croom is not morally pure and does not earn a reward. The most obvious instance of her immorality is the implication that she has been aware all along that her husband is a serial killer. When she finds the corpses in the attic, she is neither shocked nor frightened; the situation is, rather, "just as she thought." By allowing her husband to kill women without interfering, she has become his accomplice. As opposed to the innocent young wife of Bluebeard, Mrs. Croom is a woman driven to look inside the forbidden room less by idle curiosity than by what she already suspects—and perhaps what she actively wants to see. In addition to rejecting conventional heroines and villains, Proulx subverts the moralism of folktales through her language. One way in which she does this is by lingering within evocative, sensuous descriptions of horrific acts without passing judgment. For example, this is her description of the bodies in the attic: "some desiccated as jerky, some moldy … covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels … some bright blue with remnants of paint … one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee." Neither Mrs. Croom nor the narrator of the story expresses any repulsion or moral objection; instead, they seem to take a creative, almost indulgent pleasure in observing carefully, which is apparent in the use of language that invokes all five senses and imagery that is surprising and even delightful (such as the "bright blue" paint). This enjoyment of the gruesome contrasts with the stringently moral world of the traditional folktale, in which description is often meant to reinforce moral codes (good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly, for instance). Furthermore, Proulx subverts the language of folktales by ending with a sentence that summarizes the story's "moral"—but which is an explicit rejection of the traditional logic of good and evil. The story's message, as summed up in the final line, is not that readers should be virtuous or that evil should be punished; it's that you "make your own fun" (or begin to find pleasure in violence) when you live in isolation. In other words, the "moral" of this story suggests that morality doesn't exist at all.
- Climax: Mrs. Croom's discovery of the bodies of women her husband has killed
- Summary: Rancher Croom is a cattleman in an area so rural that he brews his own beer and makes his own boots. His story begins mid-action as he rides across the Wyoming plains, where he stops at the edge of a canyon, dismounts his horse, and then—after a pause, with a ferocious cry—leaps from the cliff. Meanwhile, his wife, Mrs. Croom, is on the roof of their farmhouse, sawing her way into the attic, which she has been forbidden to enter for twelve years. With the saw and a hammer and chisel, she is able to cut a hole in the roof and look inside, where she discovers the corpses of women Rancher Croom has abducted and killed. Some of the bodies date to "years ago" and are aged and decayed, suggesting that Rancher Croom has been killing women for a long time, and it is also strongly implied that he has been using the corpses sexually. Proulx ends the story with a standalone sentence: "When you live a long way out you make your own fun." | 4,222 |
- Genre: Short story/Coming of Age
- Title: A&P
- Point of view: First-person narrator (Sammy)
- Setting: An A&P grocery store in a town somewhere north of Boston
- Character: Sammy. Description: Sammy, the narrator of the story, sarcastically observes the customers of A&P from his standpoint behind the cash registers. He's technically an adult at 19 years of age, but he still relates to the teenage girls who walk into the store, and he reacts to Lengel's authority with youthful rebellion. However, as a blue-collar worker, he has to face more uncertainties and fears about the future than the girls do, and he finds himself dreading the adult consequences of his actions at the end of the story.
- Character: Queenie. Description: Queenie is the leader of the group of three girls who walk into the store in their bathing suits. Unlike the others, Queenie is unabashed and self-assured, walking deliberately through the store in a suit with her straps down. Sammy, our narrator, describes the sight of her as "more than pretty." When Lengel reprimands her for wearing just a bathing suit into the store, however, her self-confidence wavers slightly, and her response—that she's getting herring snacks for her mother—reveals her youth. It's also clear to Sammy that Queenie belongs to a higher socioeconomic class than he does, as he imagines the type of gathering her parents might have put together and contrasts it with the sorts of get-togethers his own parents have.
- Character: Lengel. Description: Lengel is the A&P's manager. Also a Sunday school teacher, he runs the A&P with a watchful eye, and Sammy describes him as "dreary." Lengel acts as a kind of force for conformity, and reprimands the girls for wearing their bathing suits into the store, embarrassing Queenie and, ultimately, causing Sammy to quit.
- Theme: Growing Up. Description: The narrator, Sammy, is 19 years old and inhabits an in-between space between adulthood and adolescence, a standpoint from which he can both relate to the girls when they face authority and also observe and act as their unlikely defender, since he's a few years older. He also has to answer to his parents still—Lengel mentions them in an attempt to get Sammy to reconsider his decision to quit—but he's technically (legally) an adult, too. For comparison, Sammy's coworker Stokesie is only three years older and is already married with two kids. As Sammy approaches adulthood, he also has to face the consequences of his actions more directly. Just a few years older than the three girls who walk into A&P in their bathing suits, Sammy relates to the girls because of their youth. However, unlike the girls, Sammy can't just invoke his parents or use them to excuse his behavior as the girls do when Lengel reprimands them. Sammy, instead, will have to answer to his parents' disappointment and find other means of supporting himself when he quits, and the dejected sense of foreboding he has at the end of the story carries the weight of the consequences he'll have to face for his actions. Sammy's rash act of quitting is a youthful act, inspired by his connection with the girls, but as he faces the consequences of his actions, he realizes that he's no longer a youth as the girls are and will have to answer to the consequences as an adult.
- Theme: Sex, Gender, Power. Description: The three girls walk into the store, and it seems that their sexuality asserts power in the way that they turn heads and capture the attention of the store-goers and employees. The girls are aware that others are watching them, but they act oblivious, and this dynamic seems to lend the girls a kind of unspoken power. However, this power proves to be something of an illusion, since the girls can't really harness it—as Sammy says, "Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it"—and they can't adequately come to their own defense when Lengel asserts his own personal power within the store and shames them. He accuses the girls of being indecent, and in doing so asserts that the girls' attire goes against social norms, that the girls' sexuality is itself inherently indecent, and blames the girls for the men's sexual desire for them.Sammy's response to defend the girls and sacrifice himself arises because he's both attracted to them and wants to be their defender. As he attempts to protect the girls from Lengel's power, however, Sammy actually objectifies them further in some sense—he renders them more helpless, as passive objects of desire who require his defense and can't act for themselves.
- Theme: Appearances and Inner Lives. Description: Sammy, as a store employee, judges everyone who walks through the store based on their appearances, what they buy, and how they act. He imagines what their inner lives might be like (the fifty-year-old woman, for example, who's been watching cash registers for the past forty years, looking for a mistake) and he analyzes the girls as they walk into the store, identifying their leader and envisioning their social backgrounds. The girls are dressed only in their bathing suits, and Sammy spends the entire first half of the story describing what they look like. Other customers and store employees react to their appearance too, which doesn't conform to the social norm of what one should wear into the town's grocery store. The conflict of the story arrives when the store's manager confronts the girls about their appearance, asking them to dress decently when they come in to shop—which embarrasses the girls and leads to the climax of the story when Sammy quits.At the end of the story, Sammy, who has believed himself able to understand the inner lives of all the customers based on their actions and appearances, is suddenly faced with the realization that he doesn't quite understand why he just quit— in other words, his own inner self is something of a mystery to him. And part of his realization of the difficulty of the world may rest on his sudden understanding that his blithe, arrogant, and youthful way of looking at the world was wrong.
- Theme: Individualism and Ethics. Description: When Sammy quits, he asserts his individualism. The other characters in the story all follow someone or some code of conduct. Lengel enforces the polices of the store and general social norms without being able to explain why they exist, only responding, "This isn't the beach." Stokesie follows the normal path of ambition to become the next store manager. The customers, who Sammy refers to as "sheep," avoid confrontation and choose not to disturb their usual routines. As Sammy says, "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." Sammy, in contrast, confronts the authority figure, Lengel—the store manager and a Sunday school teacher who represents all the conservative moral and social codes of conduct of the town—and presents him with his own ethical code, saying that Lengel shouldn't have embarrassed the girls. The girls in their bathing suits, and Queenie in particular, represent the sort of willingness to break social norms that Sammy admires ("Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency"), even if the girls' breaking of those norms is more in line with a prank or game than a real rebellion. When Lengel disagrees, Sammy does something completely unexpected and quits, as the customers nervously back away, uncertain how to proceed in this unforeseen turn of events. Yet the end of the story provides a further comment on individualism, as Sammy realizes how hard the world will be on him, how hard the world is on anyone who resists its rules and norms.
- Theme: Class. Description: The girls in their bathing suits flaunt their wealth, as they've obviously been lounging by the pool or beach while the people in the store have been working. As Queenie speaks, Sammy envisions the type of background she might come from, coming into A&P to buy fancy herring snacks for her parents. Sammy's defense of the girls also involves a hope of impressing them, but they shuffle out of the store without taking any notice of his sacrifice on their behalf. He is from a lower class and is beneath them, which adds another element to the foreboding feeling he has about his future. Looking back at Lengel's weariness, he realizes that he, like Lengel, is stuck in the working class. While the girls' class protects them from the consequences of their actions—Queenie draws from a reserve of superiority when she remembers her place in the confrontation with Lengel—Sammy has to face the consequences of his actions without any protection of wealth or class.
- Climax: Sammy quits
- Summary: Three girls walk into the A&P in their bathing suits, as Sammy rings up the groceries for a woman in her fifties. Distracted by the sight of the first girl who catches his eye—a "chunky" girl in a green plaid bathing suit, with a nice tan—Sammy accidentally rings up a package of crackers twice, causing the woman to complain. Sammy fixes the mistake for her and sends her on her way. By this time, the girls are in the bread aisle, and Sammy observes them, describing each of their appearances. There's the girl in the green plaid bathing suit he saw first, and then another tall girl, who Sammy describes as the type of girl who other girls find "striking" though they know she'll never make it—and then there's the leader, Queenie. The leader walks deliberately in a pink bathing suit with her straps down, and Sammy admires the smooth plane of her chest and the rim of pale skin that her bathing suit exposes when she wears the straps looped loosely around her arms. Sammy believes that Queenie can sense that people are watching her, but she pretends not to notice, turning slowly to confer with the other girls as they walk down the aisle toward the meat counter. The sight of the girls surprises the other shoppers at A&P, but they return their gazes quickly to their own shopping baskets. Sammy comments that someone could set off dynamite in the A&P, and the "sheep" would continue unfazed, looking at their grocery lists. However, a few "house-slaves in pin curlers" do turn to give the girls a second disapproving look. Stokesie, another clerk, also ogles the girls and jokes with Sammy about them. At twenty-two, Stokesie is just a few years older than Sammy, but he already has a wife and two kids. He aspires to become the manager of the A&P one day. The girls reach the meat counter and ask McMahon something, and he points them on their way. As they walk off, McMahon sizes them up, and Sammy begins to feel sorry for the girls. "Poor kids," he comments, "…they couldn't help it." Since it's a quiet Thursday at the store, Sammy doesn't have much to do except wait for the girls to reappear between the aisles. When they emerge again, Queenie is still leading the way, heading for the cash registers with a jar in her hand. She considers Stokesie and Sammy, but an elderly person reaches Stokesie first, so Queenie heads for Sammy's register. She hands him a jar of Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream and pulls a folded dollar bill out of her cleavage, a gesture Sammy finds "so cute." Then, the store's manager, Lengel, walks through the door and notices the girls. He reprimands them, saying that A&P "isn't the beach." Queenie blushes loses some of her composure and replies that her mother told her to buy herring snacks, causing Sammy to imagine the type of high-class gathering her parents might be holding, with cocktails and herring snacks, and contrasting it with the mental image of his own parents' parties, at which guests drink lemonade and beer. Lengel tells the girls that they should dress decently when they enter the store, and Queenie regains her self-possession, announcing with some defiance that they are decent. Lengel responds that he doesn't want to argue and advises them to cover up their shoulders next time, as it's the store policy. Sammy absentmindedly rings up Queenie's jar of herring snacks, and as the girls hurry out of the store, he quickly announces, "I quit," in time for them to hear. However, the girls continue on their way, paying no attention. Sammy takes off his bowtie and apron, laying them on the counter, as Lengel reminds him that he doesn't want to do this to his parents and will feel the repercussions of his actions for the rest of his life. Although Sammy feels that there's truth in Lengel's words, he continues outside, where he looks for the girls. The girls are gone, however, and as Sammy looks back into the storefront, he sees Lengel in his spot at the cash register. Observing Lengel's gray face and stiff back, Sammy's stomach drops as he realizes how hard the world will be to him in the future. | 3,162 |
- Genre: Social Commentary, Ghost Story
- Title: A Christmas Carol
- Point of view: A third-person, omniscient narrator
- Setting: London
- Character: Ebenezer Scrooge. Description: The quintessential miser, he is cruel-hearted, underpays his clerk Bob Cratchit, and says "Humbug!" to the Christmas festivities that bring joy to everyone around him. But when he is visited by the ghost of his old partner Jacob Marley, he begins to see the error of his ways. Scrooge is shown his own past, and the sight of his neglected childhood Christmasses begins to explain why he began his downward spiral into misery. Scrooge is scared and regretful when he sees the vivid images of the Christmas Yet to Come, which predictably leaves him dying alone. His reversal, from the anti-Christmas figure to the spirit of Christmas shows clearly the message of hope and forgiveness Dickens intended for his readers.
- Character: The Ghost of Christmas Past. Description: A strange combination of young and old, he has the innocence of an infant, but is seen as if through a veil of time, as if he is very elderly. He wears white robes and glows bright like a candle. At the end of his tour with Scrooge, this light is extinguished with a cap, making it clear that he is "reborn" and dies again every Christmas. He shows Scrooge the scenes of Christmas past.
- Character: The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Description: The most ominous of all the spirits, he is a robed, silent figure and Scrooge fears his message most of all. The spirit points his bony hand towards the visions he has in store, and eventually leads Scrooge to his own lonely grave stone, a prediction of his fate if his lifestyle remains the same. This spirit seals the moral lesson of the story.
- Character: Bob Cratchit. Description: Scrooge's loyal clerk, he is very poorly treated by his boss and his large family live in cold and poverty. The eldest children work hard and Bob is always looking to find them better situations. His youngest son, Tiny Tim, is the light of Bob's life but is very ill and needs medical attention that Bob can't afford. Bob is a prime example of the virtues of Christmas and provides the antidote to Scrooge. He is also a symbol of forgiveness – he toasts to Scrooge, despite his horrible work conditions, and in the face of Scrooge's eventual remorse, is open and accepting rather than bitter.
- Character: Tiny Tim. Description: The crippled son of Bob Cratchit, he can be seen sitting on his father's shoulder or struggling along with his crutch. But far from being a symbol of suffering, Tim is the merriest, bravest character of all, always reminding others of the spirit of Christmas. The thought of Tiny Tim's death, and its confirmation in the vision of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, fills Scrooge with regret.
- Character: Jacob Marley. Description: Scrooge's former business partner. Despite not being particularly missed by Scrooge, he was nevertheless the miser's only friend, and is the figure that haunts and protects him by appearing in place of Scrooge's door knocker and introducing the three Christmas ghosts. He makes manifest the horror of regret with his burdensome chain and describes how he is doomed to wander the earth for eternity, a fate that Scrooge too will face unless he changes his ways.
- Character: Fan. Description: Scrooge's sister and Fred's mother. She is deceased at the time of the story, but in the vision of the Ghost of Christmas Past she comes to visit Scrooge in the deserted schoolroom when he is a boy and brings him the happy news that she is taking him home. She is a symbol of the loving kindness of Christmas time and her relationship to Scrooge hasn't always been a miser.
- Theme: Past, Present and Future – The Threat of Time. Description: Three ghosts appear to Scrooge to show him how he is living sinfully and what the consequences will be if he doesn't choose to live a better life. The three-part ghost story shows the reader a clear path – sins in Scrooge's past leading to his present misery and the continuation of that sin leading in the future to death, symbolized by the hooded figure. Each ghost shows Scrooge a vision of life gone wrong, set in a chronological path to destruction. At the same time, the ghosts' appearance threaten ultimately the absence of time, what will happen after Scrooge's death if he continues down this path: the purgatory of endlessly wandering the earth that Marley's ghost warned him was his fate. Time in the story is distinguished by several motifs. First, bells tolling and chiming fit into the story's song-like structure and also recur at key moments, reminding Scrooge of the time and of time passing. Second the chains that Marley shakes at Scrooge to scare him are a visual reminder of the endless prison sentence of purgatory awaiting Scrooge in the afterlife. Time in the story is also threatening because of the changes its passing will enact in traditional society. Tradition is important for all of these characters – be it Scrooge with his obsessive money counting and nightly rituals or Cratchit with his love of Christmas – and the changing of the city during these industrial times threatens to break down all of these traditions through its transformation of economic conditions and the grinding poverty it inflicts.
- Theme: Family. Description: The entrance of Scrooge's nephew Fred at the beginning of the story introduces another side to the miser. Scrooge is not unfortunate in the way of relatives – he has a family awaiting his presence, asking him to dinner, wanting to celebrate the season with him, yet he refuses. This is one of the important moral moments in the story that helps predict Scrooge's coming downfall. It shows how Scrooge makes choices to prolong his own misery. He chooses to live alone and in darkness while even poor Cratchit is rich in family. Scrooge's distaste for Fred's happiness is not just annoyance at the sight of merriness and excess, it is also motivated by bitterness towards marriage based on Scrooge's own lost love Belle, who left him long ago. In the story, cold and loneliness are set up in opposition to the warmth of family. Symbols of coldness such as Scrooge's empty hearth, refusal to provide heat for Cratchit, and keeping his own house dark to save money show Scrooge's cruelty and lack of connection. But family provides the antidote to this coldness. When Fred enters, the counting house suddenly warms up. Further, Cratchit's warmth, despite his lack of coal, and the togetherness and energy of his large family, show him to be one of the most fortunate men in the story. Scrooge does have a kind of family in his partner Marley, who is described at the beginning of the novella as fulfilling many roles for Scrooge before his death. The inseparability of their names above the firm's entrance shows how close they are—at least in business terms—and though they are bachelors they share their lives, and the suite of rooms is passed down like a family legacy from Marley to Scrooge. Ultimately, from Marley's warning and the visions provided by the ghosts, Scrooge does learn to appreciate and connect with Fred and the rest of his family, and to even extend that family to include the Cratchits.
- Theme: Greed, Generosity and Forgiveness. Description: Scrooge is a caricature of a miser, greedy and mean in every way. He spends all day in his counting house looking after his money but is so cheap that he keeps his house in darkness, his fire small and allows no extravagance even on Christmas day. But we soon learn that he is the most impoverished character – he is lacking love, warmth and the spirit of Christmas, all of which make lives like Bob Cratchit's so worth living despite their hardships. The story's structure and Scrooge's character development are engineered so that as Scrooge becomes aware of his own poverty and learns to forgive and listen to his buried conscience, he is able to see virtue and goodness in the other characters and rediscovers his own generosity – he even becomes a symbol of Christmas in the final stave. Scrooge is remedied in the novella by the Christmas-conscious characters that surround him, including his own nephew and Bob Cratchit and his family, who show Scrooge in the Ghost of Christmas Present's tour the true meaning of goodness. All of the generous characters in the story are financially downtrodden but succeed in being good and happy despite their lot, whereas Scrooge needs to go through a traumatic awakening in order to find happiness. But the virtue that really ensures Scrooge's transformation is forgiveness – it is this key of Christian morality that saves him when the characters that he has always put down—Fred, Bob Cratchit—welcome him into their homes when he undergoes his transformation, giving Dickens' tale the shape of a true religious redemption.
- Theme: Christmas and Tradition. Description: A Christmas Carol was published as a Christmas story, and takes the form of a Christian morality tale containing a moral lesson that the highly religious and traditional English population of Dickens' time would enjoy. Its structure, with five "staves" instead of chapters, is a metaphor for a simple song, with a beginning, middle and end. Dickens uses the idea of singing to connect the story to the joyful Christian traditions of the season, such as caroling, while at the same filling it with more serious, politically-minded themes. This theme has two aspects: Firstly, the festive, jolly Christmas atmosphere flourishes in the streets surrounding Scrooge's company office, and the ethos of the nativity story is embodied in characters like Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and Scrooge's nephew – these characters are examples of goodness and charity, and show Scrooge the way to kindness. The love and strength of the Cratchit family despite their poverty shows the reader that the spirit of Christmas can defeat Scrooge's spirit of misery. At the same time, Dickens uses the seasonal period around Christmas to highlight the sort of unfair and crushing poverty that the Cratchit's face. The cold, bleak winter weather exacerbates the terrible privations poor families of the era had to face, and in presenting the poor in such extremes A Christmas Carol profoundly criticizes the laws, policies, and economic system that promote such poverty. In this way, by allowing Dickens to use the harshness of winter to portray the terrible difficulty of the life of the poor, Christmas served Dickens as a vehicle not just for showing Scrooge's transformation but to appeal to readers' Christianity as well in an effort to change a society that was organized in some ways that Dickens saw as being profoundly un-Christian.
- Theme: Social Dissatisfaction and the Poor Laws. Description: A Christmas Carol has attracted generations of readers with its clear parable-like structure and compelling ghost story. It's a moral tale that has proven timeless, but Dickens also wrote the story with a very present problem in mind, and his structure was designed to make the real issues of Victorian London stand out and provide greater awareness in the reading masses. For instance, the two gentlemen that ask for Scrooge's charity are kindly but unable to inspire Scrooge's sympathies. In Scrooge's easy assurance that the poor not only belong in but actually deserve to live in the poor house, the story conveys a message about the visibility and effectiveness of charity being swamped by common misconceptions that the poor house is a functional institution keeping poor people usefully employed. In fact, the poor house was an institution that did nothing to help the poor. Rather, it was a terrible place that served primarily to keep the poor out of view of those who were better off. Scrooge's repetition of his dismissive phrase "Humbug!" is a symbol of the insensitivity and ignorance of the middle class looking down on and dismissing the poor. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows us not only Scrooge's miserable future but also the future of his contemporaries, the traders and bankers that are discussing his funeral lunch and not caring at all that he has died. Dickens shows us that meanness is often connected to the pursuit of wealth. Further, he shows how such meanness is a cycle, almost catching. Scrooge, then, transforms a larger fate than his own when he discovers charity.In fact, A Christmas Carol has had a tangible effect on poverty, at least on a small, individual scale – stories abound of factory owners and merchants being so affected by readings of A Christmas Carol that they sent their workers gifts and changed harsh conditions.
- Climax: Scrooge realizes that he will die alone and unloved if he carries on treating people the way he does. The sight of Christmas Yet to Come awakens his sense of remorse and he is desperate to change his fate.
- Summary: It is Christmas Eve, seven years since the death of Jacob Marley, the business partner and only friend of Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is in his counting house, keeping a cruel monopoly on the coal supply and keeping his clerk Bob Cratchit in the cold. Scrooge's nephew, Fred, makes a visit, but his incessant seasonal merriness aggravates Scrooge, and he says "Humbug!" to Fred's idea that he spend Christmas dinner at Fred's house. The next visit is from two gentlemen collecting for the poor, but Scrooge believes in keeping the poor in the workhouses and sends them away. When Scrooge arrives home, he is greeted by a series of spooky apparitions. First, his door knocker turns into Jacob Marley's face. Scrooge refuses to believe his senses and hurries upstairs. But he is visited again, this time by the full-length spirit of Marley, bound in a huge, clanking chain. Marley's ghost tells Scrooge that he has been wandering the earth trying to undo the wrongs that he neglected in his lifetime. He warns that Scrooge is headed for the same fate, an even worse one considering his horrible spirit. Marley tells Scrooge that he will be visited by three spirits on the next three nights. Marley then disappears, and Scrooge falls into a deep sleep. When Scrooge wakes up, it is still dark, as if no time has passed. He is greeted by the first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, a candle-like apparition that is brightly glowing and reminds Scrooge of youth and age at the same time. He flies Scrooge through the window and they pass over the scenes of Scrooge's youth, firstly witnessing his lonely days in the schoolroom until his sister Fan comes to bring him home. Then, they see Scrooge as an apprentice with the Fezziwigs – it is a joyous time of parties and music. Then, Scrooge sees the moment that his fiancée Belle broke off their engagement because of Scrooge's single-minded focus on making money. Scrooge is upset by this vision. The spirit is extinguished and Scrooge falls asleep. The next time Scrooge wakes, there is a warm light coming into the room and he finds the Ghost of Christmas Present, a gentle giant in a fur robe, sitting atop a feast of Christmas food. This spirit takes Scrooge through the town, invisibly visiting the merry townspeople and sprinkling the spirit's magic incense on their dinners to make them filled with joy. They visit Bob Cratchit's house, where Bob's large, hard-working family are happily preparing for Christmas. Bob brings his crippled son Tiny Tim home and tells his wife that the poor lad is doing better. Tim's bravery touches Scrooge, but the spirit cannot promise Scrooge that Tim will be alive much longer. Then, they go to Scrooge's nephew's house and watch the party sing and play games, often making fun of Uncle Scrooge. Scrooge starts having fun invisibly playing along with the games but the spirit's time is running out. He reveals two impoverished children sheltering under his robe, called Ignorance and Want and tells Scrooge to beware of Ignorance most of all. The next night, the third and final spirit comes towards Scrooge, enrobed in a black cloak, so that all Scrooge can see is his eerily pointing bony hand. Scrooge is terrified but eager to learn the lessons of this ghost. He is led to the trading district, where businessmen are casually discussing the death of a miserly man. Then they witness a group of scavengers, trading in the dead man's possessions for money. Scrooge is transported to a dark room, where he sees the corpse itself, covered with a cloth. He begs to see some tender emotions or tears shed for this man's death, but all the ghost can show him is a family who are relieved at his death because it lifts their debt, and the house of Bob Cratchit, which is overcome with grief at the loss of poor Tiny Tim. Lastly, the spirit points Scrooge to a grave in a churchyard—the grave of the mysterious dead man—and Scrooge sees his own name engraved. He is beside himself with fear and sadness, and desperately promises the spirit that he will keep Christmas in his heart from now on. But the spirit vanishes, leaving Scrooge in tears. Scrooge wakes up and is overjoyed that he has the chance to change the future. He laughs and shakes uncontrollably, and, upon discovering that it is Christmas morning, he joyfully sends a prize turkey to Bob Cratchit's house. He says Merry Christmas to everyone he meets on the street, and goes to his nephew's to celebrate and play games. The next day he gives Cratchit a raise, and over the ensuing years helps ensure that Tiny Tim not only survives but thrives and becomes known for his Christmas spirit. | 4,147 |
- Genre: Short story, modernism
- Title: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
- Point of view: Third person
- Setting: A clean, well-lighted café
- Character: Old Waiter. Description: The old waiter, the story's protagonist, is the older of two waiters at a clean, well-lighted café. Hemingway depicts the old waiter as kind, dignified, and wise in his belief that, since life is meaningless, one must prioritize being comfortable and dignified above all else. Because the old waiter understands the importance of small pleasures, he is sympathetic toward an old drunk who likes to stay up late drinking at his café. While the younger waiter hurries to get home, the older waiter is unrushed; he doesn't want to be anywhere else because he recognizes that lingering at the café is a pleasure. The old waiter is shown to be empathetic, since he carefully considers what led the old drunk to attempt suicide the week before, imagining what it must be like to be 80 and without a wife. He decides that "nothing" was the cause for the attempted suicide—life's meaninglessness, in other words. He then recites a version of the Lord's Prayer that replaces many words with "nada," suggesting that he, too, thinks there is no reason for anything. The old waiter's own actions mirror the old man's; when he goes for a drink at the nearby bar after his shift, for example, he quickly leaves because its shabbiness fails to provide him with the atmosphere necessary to feel comfortable and dignified, which are his priorities in life.
- Character: Young Waiter. Description: The young waiter, the antagonist of the story, is a server in the café with the old waiter. He is brash and callous toward the old drunk (a patron at the café) because he wants to get home to his family instead of staying at work. He even tells the old drunk (who is deaf) that the man should have killed himself the week before. During conversations with the old waiter about the old drunk, the young waiter betrays his naive attitudes about growing old, saying that an "old man is a nasty thing" and suggesting that the old waiter is simply talking nonsense by trying to empathize with the old drunk's suicide attempt. The young waiter thinks that his time is more valuable than the two older characters' time because he spends it on things that he thinks matter. Thus, after refusing the old drunk another drink and reducing the old waiter's conversation points to "nonsense," the young waiter exits the café and goes home.
- Character: Old Drunk. Description: The old drunk is a dignified, elderly deaf man who spends his late nights in the quiet, pleasant café at which the two waiters work. He likes to sit underneath the shadow of the tree in the electric light because the atmosphere is pleasant for drinking and relaxing. The week prior, the old drunk attempted suicide because, as the older waiter notes, he is in despair about life's meaninglessness. When the old drunk speaks, it is only to ask for more brandy from the young waiter. Otherwise, he drinks with the purpose of getting drunk. More importantly, as the old waiter also notes, the old man chooses not to get drunk in a wild or undignified manner. In fact, though he gets drunk enough to walk "unsteadily," he never loses his composure, which reflects that—in spite of his despair over the meaninglessness of life—he is committed to an existence of pleasure and dignity.
- Theme: Meaning and Meaninglessness. Description: "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" depicts three men—a young waiter, an older waiter, and an old, deaf drunk—trying to determine how to spend their night. Each character reveals their posture toward the meaning of their existence through their attitude towards spending time in the café in which the story is set. The young waiter is eager to go home to his wife, which reflects his feeling that meaning comes from keeping busy and maintaining the socially-expected balance between work and family. The older waiter and the old drunk, however, both want to remain at the café late into the night, which shows that they've accepted that they can't give their lives larger meaning, so their time is best spent making themselves as comfortable as possible. Ultimately, Hemingway favors the view of the older men—that, in the face of meaninglessness, people should spend their time feeling comfortable and dignified, as the two older men feel in the clean, well-lighted café. The young waiter, who thinks that there is no reason to stay at the café, draws purpose and meaning from clearly-defined obligations. He wants his job and his family to be in balance, so he rushes the old drunk out of the café so that he doesn't have to stay at work too late. By portraying the young man as brash and impatient, however, Hemingway discourages readers from adopting his perspective. During the waiters' conversation about the old, deaf drunk man's suicide attempt, the young man comes off as callous and even cruel. He says directly to the old drunk that he "should have killed [himself] last week," a feeling that the young waiter seems to express purely because he is impatient to get home to his wife and get some rest. Even though the old drunk can't hear him, the young waiter's spiteful attitude shocks the reader into disliking him. Furthermore, Hemingway depicts the young waiter as petty in his belief that the old drunk has "no regard for those who must work." While it's true that it's much past midnight and the old drunk man is the only café patron left (and therefore the only reason that the waiters must stay at work), the usual hour at which the café closes has not yet arrived, so the old man's behavior is not explicitly disrespectful of the waiters' time. Beyond that, the young waiter—whom Hemingway describes as "the waiter who was in a hurry"—seems indifferent to the man's despair, caring only for his own desire to go home early. In general, the young waiter comes off as being preoccupied and petty, unable to empathize with the old man or slow down and enjoy his own night. The older waiter and the old drunk, however, are unhurried and seem to take pleasure in the simple things: both men prefer "a clean, well-lighted place" to enjoy instead of going home to be alone at night. Hemingway encourages readers to take the views of the older men seriously, since their life experience gives them insight into the fact that one should prioritize comfort and dignity in the face of life's meaninglessness. Hemingway makes clear that both older men find life meaningless through the drunk man's suicide attempt and the older waiter's response to it. After the young waiter leaves, the old waiter asks himself what it was about the old drunk's suicide attempt that makes him afraid. "It was not fear or dread," he says, "It was a nothing he knew all too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too." This suggests that the older waiter finds the idea of death familiar—the nothing of death is essentially the same as the nothing of life, suggesting a uniform meaninglessness. In this way, the old drunk and the older waiter share an attitude about meaning, which is why the older waiter can empathize with the old drunk (as he clearly does when he tells the younger waiter that he doesn't like to close the "pleasant café" for people who like to stay out late). Furthermore, the old drunk and the older waiter seem to grapple with their understanding of meaninglessness in similar ways. While the old drunk is clearly more perturbed (as he's abusing alcohol and attempting suicide), both men are conspicuously unhurried to do anything else in their lives, and both men enjoy the small pleasures and comforts of the moment. The old drunk, for example, enjoys sitting "in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light," which the older waiter completely understands. When the young waiter suggests that the old drunk could go to a bodega, which is open all night long, the old waiter says that the young waiter does not understand the value of enjoying one's time in a quiet, clean, well-lit place like the café. This suggests that the older waiter, like the old drunk, finds it important to make sure that every moment in life is comfortable and pleasant, while the younger waiter is more goal-oriented, as he believes that, since the old drunk would be able to drink at either a bodega and a café, the experience would be interchangeable. Hemingway suggests that the older men treat life's meaninglessness in the right way. They're not focused on goals, or grudges, or keeping busy; instead, both older men enjoy the moment they're experiencing and seek out the small pleasures that make them feel content in the face of nothingness.
- Theme: Youth and Age. Description: The older waiter and the old drunk man share the perspective that, since life is meaningless, people should seek comfort, dignity, and enjoyment. The younger waiter, by contrast, is always too hurried to enjoy the present moment—he seems to think that he can impose meaning on his life through work or family. Hemingway depicts this difference in perspective not as an innate feature of their personalities or values, but rather as a difference based on their ages. The young waiter is naïve—he doesn't have enough life experience to give up on finding meaning and focus on finding comfort instead—while the older men have learned over time that the best way to live is to prioritize comfort and dignity. This suggests that wisdom comes inevitably with age, and that the worldview of the old should be taken seriously by virtue of their experience. The old waiter and the young waiter's perspectives on the old drunk reveal their attitudes towards aging. The young waiter says of the old drunk, "I wouldn't want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing." To this, the older waiter replies, "Not always. This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk. Look at him." A little later Hemingway completes the thought. "The [old] waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity." While both the young and old waiters agree that growing old can be lonely and difficult, the older waiter recognizes the value of dignified living and he respects the way that the old drunk has aged, since it shows his wisdom and dignity. In contrast, the young waiter cannot see the old drunk for who he is at all. He senses that the old drunk's loneliness contributed to his suicide attempt, but his empathy stops there. "He's lonely," the young waiter says. "I'm not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me." Therefore, the young waiter fails to empathize with the drunk man because he himself has never experienced what that man has gone through, demonstrating a weakness of youth. Hemingway then compares the values of youth with the values of age. After the old waiter makes a joke about the young man's certainty that his wife is, in fact, waiting for him in bed, the young waiter replies that he is confident that she is. "You have youth, confidence, and a job," answers the old waiter, "You have everything." But by virtue of having "everything," the story suggests the young waiter fails to understand the nothingness that is at the core of life. That having "everything" prevents the waiter from understanding life is clear from his inability to understand the old drunk's suicide attempt and the old waiter's beliefs about the virtues of living with dignity. The young waiter believes that the old waiter is talking "nonsense," since he doesn't understand how dignity could coexist with everything being lost. For the young waiter, dignity is found in doing things of consequence, which accounts for his constant hurry. However, through the wisdom and simple enjoyment that the old men exude, Hemingway suggests that it's only once everything is inevitably lost through time and aging that people become wise and knowledgeable enough to grapple with how they should spend their days.
- Theme: Despair. Description: Hemingway thinks that he has an answer, or at least a partial answer, to despair. The older characters in the story neither ignore their lives' meaninglessness nor succumb to pure indifference. Instead, they come to terms with the fact of despair by deliberately countering its effects—namely, by finding comfortable places in which they can enjoy themselves and by prioritizing finding dignity. While this offers none of the comforting measures of, say, the Catholic faith of the person who confidently recites the Lord's prayer, it serves a similar function: providing a means of living with purpose and peace. By highlighting the old men's approaches to life in the midst of meaninglessness, Hemingway gives a roadmap for how to assuage despair. It's important to note that Hemingway does not connect the cause of despair with loneliness or poverty. The old drunk is neither entirely alone, because he lives with his niece, nor is he destitute, as the old waiter clarifies. Instead, the old drunk's suicide attempt and the old waiter's fear stem from their mutual recognition that life is without meaning. Both require a drink to "swallow" this truth, of course, but they likewise confront that reality by acting in a dignified manner. In other words, the old men practice the very habits Hemingway offers as a counterweight to despair. Both the old drunk and the old waiter seek out a quiet place over a loud place, a clean place over a dirty place, and a well-lighted place over a dark place. This provides the ambiance needed not only to enjoy one's time, but also to function in a dignified manner. While despair might lead some to abandon any concern for how they appear while drunk in public, Hemingway shows the reader an old drunk who is dignified even after a long night of drinking, and even in the face of meaninglessness. This dignity is, in a way, an act of defiance against his despair.
- Climax: The older waiter recites his take on the Lord's prayer
- Summary: In a quiet café, an old deaf man decides to stay late into the night to get drunk. The young waiter serving him is frustrated that he'll be stuck at the café serving the old drunk instead of at home in bed with his wife, a grievance he airs to the older waiter working with him. The older waiter, however, sympathizes with the old drunk, highlighting the fact that the man tried to commit suicide the week before. He imagines that it must be nice for the old drunk to stay up late in a quiet, clean, well-lighted place. Eventually, the old drunk waves the young waiter over to ask for more brandy, which irritates the young waiter even more. When he arrives to take the order, the young waiter warns the old man that he will get drunk. The old man, however, does not reply, and the young waiter reluctantly returns to get a saucer and some brandy. While pouring the brandy, he tells the old waiter that he wishes the old drunk would have killed himself—then he repeats this sentiment to the old drunk himself, who cannot hear the young waiter since he is deaf. The young waiter and the old waiter discuss why the old man tried to kill himself. While the younger waiter argues that he's "lonely" or that old people have nothing to live for, the old waiter speculates that the suicide attempt was not from loneliness or destitution, but rather out of despair about the meaninglessness of life. Moreover, the old waiter finds the old drunk to be admirable in his manner: he is dignified in the face of meaninglessness and despair, as he doesn't get drunk in an unseemly way. To this, the young waiter replies that the old waiter is "talking nonsense." After requiring the old drunk to leave the café, the young waiter finishes his conversation with the old waiter and leaves as quickly as possible. The old waiter, however, continues the conversation with himself, trying to locate the reason for both his empathy for and his fear of the old drunk. He decides that both his empathy and fear spring from his knowledge that "it was all a nothing and man was a nothing too." In other words, he decides that what's bothering him is how the old man's behavior reminds him of the meaninglessness of life. Upon this realization, he recites the Lord's Prayer, swapping out many of the words with "nada." He also recites the Hail Mary, swapping out words for nothing: "Hail Mary, full of nothing. Nothing is with thee." After finishing his soliloquy, the old waiter decides to go to a bar to get a drink. After telling the barman he would like "nada" to drink (and getting called a crazy person), he decides that, like the old drunk, he does not want to get drunk in a dirty place. In order to face meaninglessness with dignity, he needs a quiet, clean, well-lighted place. He then goes home and waits until the morning to fall asleep. | 3,876 |
- Genre: Science-fiction
- Title: A Clockwork Orange
- Point of view: First person narrator (Alex)
- Setting: Dystopian England in the not-so-distant future
- Character: Alex. Description: The narrator and protagonist of A Clockwork Orange. Alex is a smart "nadsat" [teen] boy with a penchant for what he calls "ultra-violence," as well as a deep love for classical music. He is a manipulative sociopath, and he rarely feels remorse for his reprehensible actions. After being sent to prison when he is caught after committing heinous acts such as rape and murder, Alex elects to undergo Reclamation Therapy in order to be released from prison. This therapy makes him unable to even think about violence without experiencing pain, and also keeps him from enjoying music—but it does not seem to actually teach him about right and wrong. Post-therapy, he is so anguished by the sound of music that he attempts suicide, and survives only after receiving a blood transplant, which also reverses the Reclamation Therapy. Years after splitting from his first gang of "droogs," Alex finds a newly-married Pete in a coffeehouse, and seems stirred to settle into a more moral life.
- Character: F. Alexander. Description: A writer who lives in the cottage called HOME that Alex and his droogs break into, proceeding then to rape and murder his wife. Later, F. Alexander unknowingly takes Alex in after Alex coincidentally returns to his home to seek help. F. Alexander is writing a book called A Clockwork Orange, which is an activist polemic against Reclamation Therapy. When he discovers that Alex was responsible for the rape and murder of his wife, he is determined to harm Alex and ends up imprisoned himself.
- Theme: Language. Description: A Clockwork Orange's ingenious use of language is one of the book's defining characteristics. Beginning with the novel's arresting opening, readers are inundated with "nadsat" slang, the part-Cockney, part-Russian patois Alex uses to narrate the story. Alex's language, like the novel as a whole, is a chaotic amalgam of high and low. Just as the plot juxtaposes grotesque violence with poignant art, Alex melds disparate linguistic influences in his narration: nadsat jargon mingles with archaic formalities into a self-conscious collage. In this way, the book's specific language is a constitutive part of its overall message—it would not be the same work of art if paraphrased in different words.The book's jarring contrasts in speech styles also illustrate how socially marginal the "nadsats" and their niche lexicon are. Characters' linguistic differences articulate their social differences, and this allows Alex to shrewdly shift between registers of speech to suit his needs. To deceive adults into letting down their guard, Alex affects a "gentleman's goloss [voice]," an almost laughably courteous mannerism punctuated by "pardons," "sirs," and "madams." Throughout the book, Alex performs an assortment of these golosses, from "shocked" to "preaching." His judgments about others derive largely from their manner of speaking, as well. This hyper-sensitivity to speech registers allows Alex to mask his insensitivity to other social cues. Much of the time, he relies on his affect to replace genuine emotion. However, although Alex's linguistic manipulations make him seem cold-hearted and unemotional, Burgess's clever use of language throughout the novel validates his protagonist's views: language really is the means by which we understand the world. As the novel itself illustrates, the very words in which something is told are inextricable from its meaning, and this gives us insight into human beings and literature alike.
- Theme: Sadism and Society. Description: Another of the work's stylistic trademarks is its frequent and graphic depiction of violence. In the first chapters of the book, Alex savagely beats a doddering scholar, rapes women and girls, and murders an elderly shut-in. But although Alex stands out as a merciless sadist in the earlier part of the work, later events reveal that other members of his society are also capable of similar behavior. The doctors who administer gruesome films to Alex seem thrilled by the violence. When the old scholar from the beginning of the book reencounters Alex, he and his cohort give the now defenseless youngster a vicious beating. When Alex implores the police to rescue him from his assailants, the "millicents" instead beat him and rape him with impunity. Even F. Alexander, the principled crusader for criminal rights, is overcome with bloodlust when he discovers that Alex was responsible for the fatal rape of his wife.This societal susceptibility to sadism demonstrates a cynical view: that individuals are predisposed towards barbarism. Moreover, society seems somewhat arbitrarily to punish these impulses in some people, while allowing others to manifest such tendencies with impunity, and to withhold for itself the right to exert violence whenever it wishes. Important, too, is that the act of reading and enjoying A Clockwork Orange itself represents a relishing of violence. By producing such a grisly work, Burgess forces self-aware readers to assess their own barbaric tendencies and come to terms with the way in which society does and does not sanction these impulses.
- Theme: Free Will vs. the "Clockwork Orange". Description: The title of the novel is an allusion to its central ethical dilemma. The phrase "A Clockwork Orange" appears within the book as the name of F. Alexander's polemic against Reclamation Treatment, the state-sponsored aversion therapy that Alex undergoes. Reclamation Treatment renders criminals unable to think about violence without experiencing extreme pain themselves, thus removing a significant amount of their free will. In this way, the treatment turns individuals into "clockwork oranges"—nadsat speak for "clockwork men." The prison chaplain is particularly attuned to the moral quandary inherent in this treatment: "What does God want?" he muses, worried of the consequences of Alex's therapy. "Does God want woodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"The complexity of this problem is best illustrated by the predicament of the activist F. Alexander, who attempts to use Alex as the poster child of his campaign against Reclamation Therapy. On one hand, F. Alexander is morally opposed to stripping criminals of free will. However, the activist later recognizes Alex as the perpetrator of the brutal, lethal rape of his wife—a devastating tragedy that he feels the overwhelming need to avenge. For F. Alexander to maintain his ethical stance, he would need to advocate for restoring Alex's ability to commit further, equally heinous crimes. This position is, unsurprisingly, impossible for the activist to support, and he is locked away after making threats on Alex's life. Readers are left to resolve the question on their own: is it just to reintroduce a criminal to society by removing the free will that impelled him to act abhorrently? Or is it more moral to lock him in prison, while he remains unrepentantly and ineradicably sadistic—but mentally unfettered?
- Theme: Art and Humanity. Description: Burgess's malevolent protagonist is humanized, somewhat, by his reverent appreciation for the fine arts. Even though Alex is a bloodthirsty sociopath and a public menace, he is not utterly nihilistic. The sound of his favorite classical music seems to induce a more humane, respectful temperament in him. For example, when Dim behaves boorishly in a diner while a girl sings nearby, Alex punches him and reprimands him harshly. This altercation precipitates the droogs' betrayal of Alex. In this way, Alex's reverence for music ends up distancing him from his inhumane lifestyle as well as his inhumane tendencies.Accordingly, when the Reclamation Treatment deprives Alex of the fundamental human characteristic of free will, he is also robbed of his fundamental human ability to treasure music. When Alex hears music after being administered the treatment, it causes him so much anguish that he attempts suicide. "I slooshied [listened] for two seconds in like interest and joy, but then it all came over me, the start of the pain and the sickness, and I began to groan deep down in my keeshkas [guts]," he narrates. This scene demonstrates that art taps into the same fundamental aspect of the human psyche as the violence Alex was conditioned to abhor. Humanity is a complicated concept in Burgess's novel: it is simultaneously the best and the worst in Alex. The free will that compels him to murder and rape is also what fosters his earnest, edifying esteem for masterful art. Without this free will, Alex is a clockwork man—which, it seems, is hardly a man at all.
- Theme: Conformism. Description: In any society, individuals forfeit some of their autonomy in exchange for protection against a world that is too dangerous to navigate alone. The universe of A Clockwork Orange is no exception. Throughout the book, Alex is forced to reconcile his arrogant individualism with his inability to live completely self-sufficiently. Droogs band together to protect themselves from other gangs, and Alex's selfish individualism alienates his own droogs to catastrophic results. Prisoners band together to protect themselves, and when Alex is singled out from his cellmates he is forced to undergo Reclamation Treatment. Society as a whole forces its members to balance moral considerations with their own self-interest—the prison chaplain, for example, initially does not speak out against Reclamation Treatment because he worries about his career. And, of course, the tension between absolute self-assertion and socialized life is at the center of Alex's maturation as a human being. Some characters, like Dim and Billyboy or Dr. Brodsky, find ways to bend rules and manifest their inappropriate impulses while still remaining within the realm of the socially acceptable. For Alex, this tension is finally resolved at the end of the book, when, as a somewhat older person, he concludes that the benefits of socialized life are in fact worth the constraints it imposes on individual autonomy. He understands that to live peacefully and settle down with a family he must in turn subscribe to some aspects of socialized life that he might previously have considered oppressive. Now that he has matured, however, Alex recognizes that the benefits of social assimilation far outweigh the costs.
- Climax: Alex's suicide attempt
- Summary: In a strange slang dialect that mixes non-English words and elevated diction, Alex recounts hanging out with his three "droogs," Dim, Pete, and Georgie. The group decides to rove the streets, and they beat and rob an elderly scholar. Later, the droogs come across a rival gang-leader named Billyboy. After a gang fight, the droogs break into a young couple's country cottage. They rape the wife in front of the husband and destroy the husband's manuscript for a book called A Clockwork Orange. Later that night, Alex's domineering behavior offends his droogs after the droogs don't act respectfully as some music is being performed. They part ways antagonistically. The next day, Alex skips school. His Post-Corrective Adviser, P.R. Deltoid, visits his house to caution him against misbehaving, but Alex ignores him. That evening, Georgie and Dim inform Alex that they will no longer tolerate his abusive leadership. Alex fights them, prevails, and resumes his role as leader. The boys then decide to rob an elderly woman's house. Alex breaks into the house. The woman and her cats attack him, and he retaliates brutally. He hears sirens and attempts to escape, but Dim strikes him in the eyes and the rest of the droogs abandon him to be captured. The next day, in police custody, Alex learns that his attack on the old woman has killed her. Part Two begins two years after Part One. Alex is serving a fourteen-year sentence in the State Jail ("Staja"). In prison, Alex works for the prison chaplain. The chaplain mentions a procedure, which deprives criminals of their ability to choose to misbehave. Later that day, a new prisoner is introduced to Alex's cell. He tries to molest Alex, and Alex and his cellmates take turns beating him in retaliation. This beating proves fatal, and the other cellmates blame Alex. The Minister of the Interior decides Alex will receive the experimental treatment—Reclamation Treatment—that the chaplain alluded to earlier. Under the supervision of Dr. Brodsky and Dr. Branom, Alex is given injections and forced to sit through hours of violent films. He is restrained in a chair that makes it impossible for him to close his eyes or turn away from these films, and even though the violence begins to viscerally sicken him, the doctors simply subject Alex to film after film. One film, which plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony over footage of Nazi war crimes, makes Alex especially furious, because it causes him to associate his favorite music with visceral sickness. Finally, Alex is ready for release. He is brought in front of an audience and assaulted, but his aversion to violence makes him unable to fight back. In Part Three, Alex returns to his home and finds that his parents have replaced him with a lodger named Joe. Homeless, Alex resolves to kill himself. By chance, he is spotted by the scholar he assaulted years earlier. The old man and his friends beat Alex until police arrive to break up the fight. Dim and Billyboy are among the responding policemen, and they take Alex to the countryside, rape him, and abandon him. Alex unknowingly returns to the same cottage he ransacked with his droogs, and the male homeowner—not recognizing Alex—takes him in and nurses him back to health. The homeowner is named F. Alexander, and his book A Clockwork Orange is a polemic against Reclamation Treatment. He hopes to use Alex as a political device to further this agenda. Some of his cohorts take Alex to an apartment. There, Alex is locked in a room and forced to listen to classical music; the pain is so great that he jumps out a window in a suicide attempt. Alex wakes up in the hospital to find that he has received a blood transfusion, which has nullified his Reclamation Treatment. In the hospital, he finds out that F. Alexander has been imprisoned because the author, after realizing that Alex was responsible for the lethal rape of his wife, made threats on Alex's life. Alex then returns to his old lifestyle with a new group of droogs. However, he is less interested in causing violence and mayhem than he was when younger. After reencountering his former droog Pete, who now lives a tame, married life, Alex decides that he has grown up, and wishes to settle down and live harmlessly. | 3,473 |
- Genre: Science Fiction, Satire
- Title: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
- Point of view: First Person
- Setting: Sixth-century Britain, during the reign of the legendary King Arthur
- Character: Hank Morgan. Description: Hank Morgan is the Connecticut Yankee who finds himself thrown into sixth-century Britain and the court of King Arthur at Camelot. There, he takes on Clarence as a protégé, Sandy as a damsel in distress and later as his wife, and the knights of the Round Table, particularly Sir Sagramore, as impediments to his goal of using technological innovation and schools ("man factories") to create a 19th-century civilization in Arthurian England. Hank is a man of paradoxes; though he is a dedicated advocate of American democracy, he aspires to be "The Boss" of his new society and relishes using his power (like when he forces Morgan le Fay to release her prisoners). He is bent on imposing his version of the ideal 19th-century society—one that is democratic, Protestant, capitalistic, and a technologically advanced superpower—on medieval Camelot, whether medieval society wants this change or not. Despite espousing self-determination, calling his schools "factories," suggesting that he's only interested in making one kind of person. Hank is a masterful showman, easily able to out-class Merlin and usurp his place as Arthur's chief advisor. Hank confesses his addiction to performing these "effects"—the gaudier the better—and in the end, they are his downfall. Flaunting his wealth alienates people like Marco, Phyllis, and Dowley, and disparaging the laws makes him sound like a maniac. Finally, the "effect" by which Hank aspires to prove his superiority once and for all—defeating 30,000 knights with a force of fewer than 60 men and boys armed with machine guns—traps him and his supporters behind a wall of corpses and condemns them all to die of starvation and disease. According to Clarence, Merlin puts Hank into a magic coma. M.T. then encounters Hank in the 19th-century present, where Hank dies in a hotel room after crying out for Sandy.
- Character: King Arthur. Description: King Arthur sits at the top of the feudal hierarchy in medieval England. With his wife, Queen Guenever at his side, he rules from Camelot, home to Sir Kay, Sir Launcelot, Sir Gawaine, Sir Sagramore, Sir Dinadan, and the other knights of the Round Table. Although he's followed Merlin's counsel since his youth, Arthur elevates Hank Morgan to an important position in the kingdom after seeing apparent proof of the time traveler's superior magical powers. In this way, King Arthur shows that he is no less superstitious than his medieval peers. Yet, although Hank looks down on the uncivilized, occasionally barbaric ways of Arthur's England, he develops a great deal of respect for Arthur himself. In his personal excellence of character, King Arthur represents an idealized form of chivalry. He is brave in the face of danger, either in personal combat or battling illness; he expects nothing of his knights that he's unwilling to do himself; he has self-respect and pride that cannot be extinguished by enslavement or being viciously whipped; and while he consistently defends feudal principles, he also empathizes with common folks' suffering and has a willingness to change social paradigms. When Arthur is sold into slavery, for instance, the experience inspires him to abolish slavery, and he is open to Hank's idea of retiring the monarchy with Arthur's own death. Nevertheless, Arthur equally represents the medieval mindset's limitations: he's unable to develop empathy for the commoners until he gains firsthand experience with their hardships; his respect for Hank is founded on a belief in Hank's magical powers; he's unable to see or accept that the wife he thinks is honorable is having an affair with Sir Launcelot, his best and most admirable knight; and he's unable to abandon his desire for fighting and revenge, even when he knows his life is in danger. Arthur's unwillingness to back down from a fight with his nephew and potential usurper, Mordred, allows him to kill Mordred, but it also leads to his own death, which occurs before Hank has finished transforming medieval society with 19th-century technology and ideals.
- Character: Sandy. Description: Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, whom Hank Morgan quickly begins to call "Sandy," is a young woman who travels to Camelot with a tragic tale of being imprisoned (along with dozens of other fine ladies) in a castle guarded by ogres. Hank accompanies Sandy on a quest to free the remaining women. When they arrive to find a herd of pigs, Sandy insists the women have just been enchanted to look like pigs. In this way, Sandy represents the superstitious imagination and illogical belief systems of the uncivilized, medieval Britons. But, like Clarence, Sandy plays a key role as one of Hank's sixth-century interpreters. She learns to translate his 19th-century slang and teaches him the meaning of medieval idioms. She also tells him the history of other knights he encounters and teaches him the conventions of knight errantry (for instance, once Hank has defeated the "ogres," his responsibility to the ladies/pigs is over, and he doesn't have to escort each one home individually). Sandy shows her devotion to Hank when she searches all over England for him after he disappears without warning from the Valley of Holiness (he is traveling incognito). Hank eventually realizes Sandy's value and comes to see her as a wife and a friend. Sandy names their daughter Hello-Central because she mistakenly thinks that this is the name of one of Hank's long-lost 19th-century beloveds, implying not only that she believes his outlandish tale of travel though time and space, but that she loves him enough to care about his life before he came to England. She and Hank are separated when he leaves her and Hello-Central (who is recuperating from a serious illness) in France and returns to find that England has plunged into civil war.
- Character: Clarence. Description: Clarence is a 12-year-old page at the court of King Arthur when Hank Morgan finds himself thrown into medieval England. Although everyone believes Sir Kay's claims that Hank is a dangerous monster with sharp teeth and claws, Clarence nevertheless befriends the man. This suggests his innate good sense and his ability to rely on hard evidence rather than the superstitious beliefs of his peers. Nevertheless, Clarence initially believes in Merlin's power, suggesting the strength of the beliefs that his medieval society trained into him in his childhood. After Hank proves himself to be more powerful than Merlin, Clarence becomes Hank's protégé, helping him to establish the "man factories" that will introduce 19th-century civilization into Arthurian England. Although Clarence truly believes in the value of Hank's civilization project, he still clings to aspects of his medieval training, like his instinctive respect for the institution of monarchy. Nevertheless, he follows and supports Hank until his death in the cave where Hank and his true believers made their final stand for civilization over barbaric chivalry.
- Character: Merlin. Description: Merlin is a sorcerer who serves King Arthur. Because he represents (and draws his power from) superstition and belief, Merlin is a natural foil for Hank Morgan, and the two men maintain a professional rivalry throughout the book. Merlin fails to restore the fountain in the Valley of Holiness or to protect Sir Sagramore with his magic, but he gets the last laugh (literally) when he infiltrates the camp of Hank and his allies and enchants Hank into a coma at the end of the book. Merlin dies when he accidentally touches the electrified fence surrounding Hank's base of operations.
- Character: Morgan le Fay. Description: Morgan le Fay is King Arthur's sister. A powerful enchantress and ruler in her own right, she has an antagonistic, competitive relationship with her brother. She has a reputation for wickedness, yet she is also exceptionally beautiful and charming. When Hank Morgan and Sandy are guests in her home, she both repels and fascinates the Yankee. As with the rest of the ruling class in medieval England, Hank attributes her cruelty and callousness toward others (especially her prisoners) to her training and upbringing in a society he finds superstitious and barbaric.
- Character: Dowley. Description: Dowley is an affluent blacksmith in a small English village. He was orphaned as a child and had odd jobs until he attracted the attention of the old blacksmith, who took him on as an apprentice. In this way, Dowley's story is a medieval version of an American self-determination, where a person who has nothing raises his status in the world through hard work and initiative. Dowley is proud of his success and happy to brag about it to Hank Morgan when mutual acquaintance Marco introduces the two men. But Hank shames Dowley by flaunting his own wealth during a dinner party he attends at Marco's house. And when Hank then accidentally threatens Dowley while trying to make a point about the injustice of certain medieval English laws, the blacksmith attacks Hank in an act of self-preservation.
- Character: Sir Launcelot. Description: Sir Launcelot is the strongest and mightiest of the knights who serve King Arthur and sit at his Round Table. He's also Queen Guenever's lover, a fact that is common knowledge to everyone but Arthur. When Hank Morgan overthrows the chivalric order in England, Launcelot becomes the president of the stock board and takes to destroying his rivals financially rather than through physical combat. He and Hank are close friends, and Launcelot loves Hank's daughter, Hello-Central, like a niece. But when Launcelot's affair with Guenever is revealed, his indiscretion plunges the kingdom into civil war, ultimately leading to Arthur's death and Hank's downfall.
- Character: Marco. Description: Marco is a freeman who, along with his wife Phyllis, hosts Hank Morgan and King Arthur while they travel the country disguised as commoners. In thanks, Hank buys new clothes, furniture, and lavish amounts of food for the couple. The book insinuates that "Marco" is a name assigned by Hank, who often gives his medieval acquaintances modern names. Marco is a charcoal burner who makes a small living for himself but isn't as rich as others in his village, like the blacksmith, Dowley. Nevertheless, he is generous and conscientious. He treats Hank and Arthur with kindness until Hank's attempts to show off his superior intellect scare Marco, Dowley, and the other villagers into attacking the strangers in their midst.
- Character: Sir Sagramore. Description: As a knight, Sir Sagramore serves King Arthur and sits at the Round Table. He is a physically imposing and powerful knight. When he overhears Hank Morgan wishing ill on Sir Dinadan and thinks Hank's malice is meant for him, he challenges "The Boss" (Hank) to a duel. This duel becomes a symbol battle between medieval civilization and 19th-century civilization, with Sagramore representing the medieval chivalric ideal and Hank representing the 19th-century ideal. Despite his experience and enlisting the magical help of Merlin, Sagramore loses his dignity, the duel, and his life to Hank.
- Character: Sir Gawaine. Description: Sir Gawaine serves King Arthur and as one of the knights of the Round Table. Sandy tells Hank Morgan about Gawaine's chivalric exploits, which include fighting with and befriending the Irish prince Marhaus. When a brutal civil war breaks out between Arthur and Sir Launcelot over Guenever's affections, Launcelot accidentally kills two of Gawaine's brothers. Gawaine refuses to forgive Launcelot or sign a truce, and he loses his life in the ongoing conflict.
- Character: Marhaus. Description: Marhaus is an Irish prince. He's a central player in the story Sandy tells Hank Morgan while they ride on Hank's quest. Marhaus once crossed swords with Sir Gawaine and, impressed by Gawaine's brave fighting and dauntless courage, befriended him. Marhaus later defeats a duke and his six sons, sending them to Camelot to serve King Arthur.
- Character: Sir Kay. Description: Sir Kay is the first knight whom Hank Morgan encounters in medieval England. Kay captures Hank and brings him back to Camelot as a prisoner. Claiming that Hank is a powerful magician, Kay wants Hank burned at the stake, but his plan falls through when Hank convinces everyone that he is a powerful magician. Sir Kay dies in the civil war that breaks out after King Arthur discovers Guenever's affair with Sir Launcelot.
- Character: Sir Dinadan. Description: Sir Dinadan is one of the knights who serve King Arthur at Camelot. He is a prankster and a jokester, although Hank Morgan finds his sense of humor unfunny and outdated. He is the inadvertent cause of Hank's duel with Sir Sagramore after Sagramore overhears Hank wish that that the Dinadan would die in his joust and mistakenly believes Hank's comment is directed at him.
- Character: Mordred. Description: As King Arthur's nephew, Mordred was left in charge of the kingdom when his uncle accompanied Sir Gawaine to attack Sir Launcelot in one phase of the kingdom's brutal civil war. Mordred attempted to proclaim himself the king and marry Guenever but was frustrated on both accounts. He and Arthur then fought each other, and in their last battle, each delivered a fatal wound to the other.
- Character: M.T.. Description: M.T. is the narrator who writes the first chapter and final postscript of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The narrator's initials match Mark Twain's name, suggesting that readers are meant to take the narrator as the book's author. The novel opens with M.T. encountering Hank Morgan at Warwick Castle and eagerly reading the manuscript Hank hands him at their hotel later that night (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a framed story, and the main story comes from Hank's manuscript).
- Theme: New World vs. Old World. Description: Hank Morgan, the protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, is torn from nineteenth-century America and transported back in time to sixth-century England. The novel uses Hank's experiences to explore the contrast between the democratic, egalitarian ideals of the American "New World" and the "Old World" ideals of medieval England. This contrast is a favorite theme of Hank's, who is a big fan of the New World and of the revolutions—American, French, and Industrial—that advanced democracy. Hank describes himself as a "true Yankee," a working-class man born and raised in Connecticut who rose through the ranks at the local arms factory to become the boss of 1,000 workers. As a self-made man, Hank respects those who earn their position through hard work. Therefore, he respects (and feels a sense of competition toward) medieval blacksmith Dowley, who worked his way into the medieval version of middle-class success after a childhood of poverty. Hank resents the limits that the monarchy's strict, hierarchal social classes impose on merit. Despite his relative wealth and his advanced technological know-how, the fact that he wasn't born with a noble title limits his influence. This contrast between a democratic meritocracy (where the best and smartest rise to the top) and an aristocracy can be seen with acute clarity during the episode where Hank and King Arthur examine army officer candidates. Hank's man, although clearly much more qualified, is a commoner, and so he loses to an unqualified but nobly born knight. Although Hank believes in the New World's inherent superiority, the book also examines its limits. The contrast Hank draws between the America of his birth and medieval England becomes less distinct when he considers the inhumanity of slavery in both societies. Hank may think it's better for Sir Launcelot to channel his fighting instincts into a 19th-century innovation like the stock market, but Launcelot's aggressive trading is nevertheless violent enough to instigate a civil war. The book also shows how technological progress doesn't automatically assure the public good. Some of Hank's technological innovations allow for fast, accurate communication across the kingdom (the telephone and telegraph lines); but other novel products, like land mines, bring nothing but wholesale destruction. In this way, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court praises many of the ideals of New World American democracy while simultaneously suggesting that it's challenging—if not impossible—to create a just and human society regardless of time, place, or political philosophy.
- Theme: Imperialism. Description: When Hank Morgan, the protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, finds himself stranded in sixth-century Britain, he thinks of himself a new Robinson Crusoe, Christopher Columbus, or Hernando Cortéz. Each of these men (Crusoe is fictional; Columbus and Cortéz are historical) is responsible for imposing his rule on the unsuspecting population of a distant land. As soon as Hank realizes that he's landed in a less advanced society, his first goal is to rule it. Near the end of the story, he's even preparing to re-enact and preempt Columbus's voyage by 700 years with an expedition of his own to "discover" America. Hank displays an imperialist tendency to dehumanize conquered people in his ongoing comparisons of the medieval Britons to irrational, unintelligent animals. Similarly, his ongoing habit of comparing the "savage" and uncivilized Britons to "Comanches" and "white Indians" mirrors the vexed relationship between the Native American tribes in the New World and the European colonizers who ultimately established the United States. Hank sees the technologies and values that he introduces to medieval Britain—soap, the telephone, the telegraph, trains, gunpowder, and the factories that make these things—as unmitigated goods. But the story suggests that the colonizer's story is more complicated and less triumphant than Hank makes it out to be. Cleaning the bodies of the gentry doesn't change their political values; despite superior communication technology, the Church still manages to strand Hank in France while the kingdom falls into civil war; and, in the end, Hank's ability to command the total annihilation of life is also his undoing. His belief in the superiority of his own beliefs blinds him to the good and noble in the medieval world, like King Arthur's noble gentleness. By failing to see the value in these beliefs, the colonizer—Hank—underestimates how deeply committed people are to them. The dangers that imperialism poses to the colonizer are subtle. But Hank's failure to see the humanity of his newly minted modern citizens leads to his own annihilation. The village locals turn on Hank when he tries to prove the superiority of his economic theories and unwittingly oversteps and insults them. And after he unleashes a previously unimaginable amount of destruction on the ranks of English chivalry with gatling guns and land mines, Hank finds himself trapped behind a wall made up of his enemies' rotting bodies. Believing in his own superiority, Hank ensnares himself in his own trap, belatedly learning that that the danger in trying to conquer others is at least as great as the perceived rewards.
- Theme: Nature vs. Nurture. Description: In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Hank Morgan travels back in time from nineteenth-century America to sixth-century England, where he becomes the second-most powerful man in King Arthur's kingdom. In this position, he tries to single-handedly establish an industrial civilization 13 centuries ahead of its time. But to succeed in this effort, Hank must overcome the "training," of Arthur's citizens. Hank maintains that training—the values and ideals a person is taught—is the strongest determiner of a person's character. Thus, his efforts to establish a new civilization also examine whether nature or nurture (a person's upbringing or, in Hank's words, "training") has a more powerful role in shaping a person's personality. Hank attributes the many flaws he sees in medieval society—from the nobility's arrogance to the lower classes' extreme, self-defeating respect for authority—to the training that medieval institutions (especially the Roman Catholic Church) have imposed on society. In other words, he believes that training is more powerful than nature and, by extension, that new training can easily replace old training. Thus, he thinks that if he can simply inject 19th-century values into medieval society through advertising, technological advances, and "man factories" (Hank's term the schools he establishes), then he will be able to single-handedly bring about the most peaceful governmental revolution of all time. But there are indications along the way that Hank's ideas are misguided. King Arthur, for example, retains a noble bearing despite being captured, sold as a slave, and viciously beaten over the course of the novel. This should suggest to Hank that nobility and courage are innate parts of Arthur's character, not just the result of his royal training. Meanwhile, Hank is so convinced of the superiority of his modern, democratic, American ideals that he never considers that he himself, though vastly outnumbered by medieval, feudal Britons, refuses to abandon his own training. The book never fully resolves the question of whether nature or nurture plays a stronger role in shaping society or influencing a person's behavior, but it does suggest that a person's character—as a combination of both nature and nurture—rarely strays from its well-worn path. When civil war and religious strife break out, the medieval people quickly revert to their old ways, forcing Hank to admit that his project has failed. He then blows up his "civilization-factories" and makes his last stand with his protégé Clarence and 52 boys young enough that they've spent more than half of their lives in Hank's educational factories. Thus, the novel suggests that once a person's character is fully entrenched, it can never completely change—regardless of how their character comes to be,
- Theme: Superiority, Power, and Authority. Description: Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American man who's travelled backward through time and space to sixth-century England, upholds many believes about himself and his beloved American democracy; but above all else, Hank believes he's superior to everyone in the medieval world. And in order to persuade his unsuspecting medieval followers of this superiority, he uses his superior technological know-how to create one stunning "effect" or "miracle" after another. During a natural eclipse, he pretends to have power over the sun. He goes on to blow up Merlin's tower with a lightning rod and blasting powder, restore a miraculous fountain to working order, and accurately predict King Arthur's arrival at a holy site. These performances earn Hank the second highest position in the kingdom and the title "The Boss." Hank's ascendance demonstrates that one route to power lies in convincing people of one's own superiority; meanwhile Merlin, who was only powerful because people feared him, loses authority in the face of Hank's seemingly more powerful, fearsome magic. In contrast, King Arthur's authority comes not from fear but from love. The commoners love their sovereigns, and King Arthur shows that he is worthy of this devotion when, disguised as a commoner, he cares for some of his lowliest citizens, a woman and her daughter who are dying of smallpox. Further, Hank realizes that King Arthur's power would be compromised if people stopped believing in his ability to heal "the king's disease" (the skin infection scrofula). Because Hank has earned his power through force and fear, not love, his authority is doomed to be temporary. When he tries to flaunt his wealth and superior knowledge to Marco, Dowley, and other simple villagers, he earns their distrust and fear instead of their respect. At one point, as Hank prepares to abolish the monarchy, Clarence warns him that the people love their kings and queens and worries that the social order will collapse without the cult of royalty. But Hank, blinded by the knowledge that his showmanship and technological know-how are superior to anyone else in the kingdom, fails to hear Clarence's message. When Hank "magically" defeats nearly a dozen knights in a tournament, he proves the superiority of nineteenth-century technology over sixth-century chivalry. But the defeated chivalric order's resentment simmers in the background until its knights have a chance to challenge Hank again. In the climactic Battle of the Sand Belt, Hank unleashes the full extent of his power in a show of wanton destruction: he massacres thousands of knights with land mines, electric fences, and gatling guns. But this last "effect," while powerful in sending a message about his destructive capabilities, also shows the limitations of his power. Having defeated the knights by a show of his power, without earning the true love and respect of the medieval population, Hank traps himself behind a wall of dead bodies. Showing the full extent of his destructive capabilities ironically deprives Hank of his power over the kingdom, offering a stark reminder that brute force alone is not enough to earn true authority.
- Climax: Hank and his small band of "republicans" confront 30,000 knights in a battle to determine whether England will be controlled by medieval chivalry or a 19th-century democratic technocracy.
- Summary: A narrator identified as "M.T." (pointing to the book's author, Mark Twain) encounters a strange tourist (Hank Morgan) at Warwick Castle in England. It turns out that both men are at the same hotel, and later that night, Hank begins to tell M.T. his life story. He was born and raised in 19th-century Hartford, Connecticut. Hank blacked out after receiving a blow to the head during a workplace brawl, though—and when he woke up, he was in medieval England. M.T. becomes too tired to go on, and so he gives M.T. a book containing his life story to read. Hank's book begins with a knight named Sir Kay capturing Hank and bringing him to Camelot as his prisoner. In Camelot, Hank manages to escape execution and establish a reputation as a powerful magician by predicting a total solar eclipse. Afterward, he uses his 19th-century knowledge to blow up resident sorcerer Merlin's tower. (Hank creates blasting powder, places it in the tower, and connects it to a lightning rod. Then, he uses his talent for showmanship to work the miracle during the next thunderstorm, utterly convincing the primitive medieval people that he has the power to control nature itself.) Hank's first two miracles vault him to the second-most powerful position in the kingdom after King Arthur, earning him the title "The Boss." Hank is busy laying the groundwork for an educational, social, and political revolution when Sir Sagramore challenges him to a duel. Fortunately, the date is set three or four years into the future so that Sagramore can go on a quest for the holy grail. Toward the end of this period, Hank is assigned a quest of his own when a young woman named Sandy arrives at Camelot with a horrific tale of being imprisoned (along with dozens of other ladies and princesses) by a trio of ogres. On their way to rescue the ladies, she and Hank have some other minor adventures. They stay the night with Morgan le Fay, whose brutality both horrifies and impresses Hank. When they reach Sandy's "ladies," Hank is shocked to find that the women are really a herd of pigs, and her "ogres" are a trio of scrawny swineherds. But Sandy is convinced that they've been enchanted to look like animals to Hank, and Hank "rescues" them to humor her, thus completing his quest. No sooner have Hank and Sandy turned back toward Camelot than they encounter a group of pilgrims who are traveling to see a miraculous fountain in the Valley of Holiness. When the bad news arrives that the fountain has dried up, Hank uses 19th-century technology to restore it, adding another "miracle" to his repertoire. Following the success of his quest and his growing list of miracles, Hank decides to see how the common people live by disguising himself as a freeman and traveling incognito around the kingdom. King Arthur, delighted with the idea, insists on joining Hank. During their travels, King Arthur and Hank learn how difficult life is for the common people, who are denied mercy and common humanity by the knights, their lords, or church authorities, die of smallpox, and can barely support families thanks to heavy tax burdens. But when Hank, ever the showman, overreaches and offends a group of freemen in a small village, he and the Arthur find themselves running for their lives. A gentleman rescues Hank and Arthur from a mob of angry villagers—only to sell them into slavery. sells them into slavery. Hank and Arthur witness more scenes of brutality as they're taken to London to be sold at auction. In London, Hank escapes and instigates a slave uprising that kills the slave master, for which all the slaves are condemned to death. Hank is recaptured and taken to the gallows with the rest of the slaves, but Sir Launcelot and a rescue party of 500 knights rides into the city on newfangled bikes and rescue them just in the nick of time. Restored to his position of authority in the kingdom, Hank prepares for his duel with Sir Sagramore. In the years since his arrival, he's quietly been laying the groundwork for a civilizing revolution that will bring 19th-century technology, moral sensibilities, and democracy into the sixth century. Only the chivalric code of knights and the Church stand in Hank's way, and the duel with Sagramore is his chance to show his superiority to chivalry once and for all. Although Merlin has allegedly enchanted Sagramore's armor to protect him, Hank kills the man with one shot from his revolver before dispatching nearly a dozen other knights in the same way. Having utterly humiliated and defeated knighthood, Hank is free to go public with his secret plans to reform sixth-century society. Three years later, Hank sits at the head of a humming 19th-century economy. He's now married to Sandy, and they have a daughter named Hello-Central. Hank is working on the final part of his plan: getting King Arthur to make a decree dissolving the monarchy upon his death. But then Hello-Central falls sick, and Hank and Sandy take her to recover by the sea in France. While they're gone, a civil war breaks out between King Arthur and Launcelot, and Arthur's nephew Mordred seizes the throne. Arthur and Mordred kill each other in battle, the Church places the island under interdict, and Hank's 19th-century innovations come to a screeching halt. Hank returns to England to find his second-hand man, Clarence, and 50 young boys ready to fight with him on the side of 19th century; 30,000 men ride against them. Hank and his boys defeat the knights with electric fences and explosives. But in doing so, they trap themselves behind a wall of dead bodies. The decomposition of these corpses causes disease, Hank falls into a coma, and the rest of the boys die, too. M.T. finishes reading the manuscript and goes to the stranger's room. The door is ajar, and when he pushes it open, he sees the stranger lying in bed, delirious. M.T. stays and listens to his feverish ravings until the man's strength fails, and he dies. | 7,549 |
- Genre: Short story
- Title: A Day’s Wait
- Point of view: First Person
- Setting: An American family home
- Character: The Father. Description: The father is the story's unnamed narrator. He treats his nine-year-old son with affection and tenderness, encouraging him to rest and allow his body to recover rather than stubbornly ignore the symptoms of illness. His care and concern for his son, whom he lovingly calls "Schatz," meaning "treasure," ultimately backfires. The father and the doctor both fail to share medical information with the boy—the difference between temperatures in Fahrenheit and Celsius—and inadvertently causes him great alarm.
- Character: Schatz (The Son). Description: The father's son is a nine-year-old boy nicknamed "Schatz," or treasure. When he falls ill with influenza, he attempts to appear mature, manly, and unemotional. Rather than admit to the weaknesses of illness, confusion, loneliness, or fear, he denies himself rest, company, and sympathy on what he thinks is his deathbed. At his age, he doesn't understand enough about the world to realize that America uses a different temperature scale than most other countries; since his French classmates told him that a 44-degree fever is fatal, and he has a whopping 102-degree fever, the boy mistakenly believes that he is dying. When the boy's father assures him that he isn't going to die, the boy quits trying to act so mature allows himself to cry over minor upsets.
- Character: The Doctor. Description: The doctor visits the household and measures the son's temperature at 102 degrees. He then gives the father medicine for his son and tells him that the boy has influenza, part of a mild epidemic of the flu. The doctor confidently declares that the boy will be fine as long as his temperature stays below 104 degrees and he doesn't contract pneumonia. The doctor explains this diagnosis to the father but not to the boy himself—something that would have prevented the boy from silently fearing his imminent death.
- Theme: Silence and Miscommunication. Description: In "A Day's Wait," a sick nine-year-old boy, called "Schatz" (German for "darling" or "treasure") by his father, confuses Fahrenheit with Celsius and imagines that his temperature is fatally high. This false assumption is left uncorrected for an entire day as the boy fearfully waits to die. His father, meanwhile, spends the day enjoying himself outside, utterly unaware of the terror his son is facing. Hemingway's short story is thus a tragedy of miscommunication; the boy wouldn't have endured so many hours of solitary fear had he spoken up to his father, or had his father done more to inquire into his son's state of mind. In this way, Hemingway illustrates how the failure to communicate openly and honestly can result in a knowledge gap, to be filled with painful confusion and misunderstanding. The sick boy tries to suffer in silence from the very beginning of the story. At first, he refuses to go back to bed or to admit that he's ill, even though his father seems sympathetic and attentive to his discomfort. In fact, the father, who narrates the story, speaks quite tenderly of his son, noting how he initially looks "a very sick and miserable boy of nine years." Nevertheless, even when the boy hears the doctor note that his temperature is 102 degrees and mistakenly thinks that he will die of such a high fever, he still says nothing. Having heard his French classmates say that a fever of 44 degrees (Celsius) was fatal, the boy thus believes his 102-degree fever (Fahrenheit) certainly means death, not knowing that different temperature scales exist. The boy's insistence on keeping to himself allows his macabre imagination to go unchecked, thus suggesting how silence creates an opening for trauma. Of course, the miscommunication at the heart of the story is hardly the boy's fault; both his father and doctor also fail to communicate clearly and openly with the child in their care. When his father and the doctor leave the room after examining the boy, they discuss his condition in great detail—noting, for instance, that a flu is going around and that it is "nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees." This simple fact would certainly alleviate the boy's fear, but neither adult explains this diagnosis to the boy. When the boy and his father do talk to each other, they don't speak of his condition in any meaningful way. When the boy's father asks him, "How do you feel, Schatz?" he responds merely, "Just the same, so far." He doesn't explain his feelings about being close to death, and though his father can tell that something is wrong, the latter doesn't pry. The father notices that his son seems "very detached" and that he is "looking very strangely," yet when the boy repeatedly urges his father not to stay in the room with him, he doesn't question his son about his odd behavior nor prompt him to confess what's going on. Instead, he tells himself that "perhaps [the boy] was a little lightheaded" and leaves to give him some space. He only imagines physical causes of his son's discomfort and fails to look into signs of emotional turmoil. The adults' silence on the matter of his health reinforces the boy's idea that he, too, must remain silent, and he thus continues to keep his distress to himself. Indeed, while neither the boy nor his father is trying to hurt the other, miscommunication only breeds distrust in the story. Because the boy began his day by insisting to his father that he was "all right" when he was actually feeling sick, he may suspect his father of lying in the same fashion when his father says, "Your temperature is all right […] It's nothing to worry about." The boy continues to lie to his father when he claims, "I'm taking it easy," when he clearly isn't. He doesn't believe that the medicine will work, and even when his father assures him that "You aren't going to die […] People don't die with a fever of one hundred and two," he refuses to believe him until his father explains exactly how different types of thermometers and temperature scales work. Having spent all day hiding his true feelings, the boy knows how people are capable of dishonesty and fears his father is lying. It is only when the boy and his father talk openly that the former's fear is overcome. The boy asks when he is going to die, in response to which the father finally pushes his son to elaborate on what he's thinking about. This is how the father learns that, because the boy lacked vital information—that is, because he was making assumptions amidst a sort of silence—the boy had misunderstood the difference between Celsius with Fahrenheit, and that his fever reading on the latter was nothing to be concerned about. The boy's father then tries to explain the measurements by comparing them to miles and kilometers, using clear, explicit communication to assuage the child's fears. Of course, if they had been more willing to discuss both the illness and their feelings from the beginning, there never would have been such a needless misunderstanding. Instead, a prolonged miscommunication born of mutual silence created traumatic consequences.
- Theme: Masculinity and Heroism. Description: The book that the father reads to his son in "A Day's Wait" is notably a book about pirates—men who embody toughness, bravery, and absolute autonomy; who chase after danger and meet death with pride and refuse to show weakness until the last. The mention of this book suggests that the boy is following the example of famous male heroes when he forces himself to be so stoic in the face of supposed death. Indeed, the boy's behavior reflects the fatalistic heroism that is on display in much of Hemingway's work. Here, Hemingway specifically positions ideal masculinity as a combination of courage and composure in the face of death. Though the boy's unnecessary trauma, however, the story also exposes the potential harm of such strict (and in today's world, decidedly outdated) standards of masculinity. The ideals of toughness and self-assurance in fact lead the boy to engage in damaging emotional restraint. Before the boy even hears the temperature that causes him to think he is dying, he tries to bear his painful symptoms with staunch stoicism, refusing to go back to bed despite his pounding head, chills, and bodily aches. However, pushing himself to dress and go downstairs like normal does nothing but aggravate his poor condition. As his father observes, "[W]hen I came downstairs he was dressed, sitting by the fire, looking a very sick and miserable boy of nine years." The boy lingers in a state of acute torment for the rest of the day, as Hemingway illustrates in his tortured stare: "His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in the bed and seemed very detached from what was going on"; "[H]e was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely"; "I […] found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks-flushed by the fever, staring still, as he had stared, at the foot of the bed." The terrible toll of his long day spent silently awaiting his death sentence is also illustrated in his unusual behavior the day after, when "he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance." He could be crying excessively because the normal effort to master his emotions feels too painfully reminiscent of the previous day's ordeal, or because he is still struggling to process the overwhelming grim fear that haunted him for so many hours. Either way, he is clearly suffering from the aftereffects of his silent, drawn-out martyrdom. Ironically, in many respects the boy's father actually presents a contrast to Hemingway's typically emotionally reserved male characters. When the young boy falls ill, readers can see immediately how he enjoys a loving and protective relationship with his father. The father tells his son that he should go back to bed three times, suggesting he would hardly think less of the young boy for his bout of weakness or dismiss his condition as nothing serious. That he lovingly calls his son "Schatz," or darling, further reveals his willingness to be openly warm and affectionate. Nevertheless, the father still exhibits several stereotypically masculine behaviors, such as following a heavily paternalistic attitude towards his son that leads him to exclude the boy from a key conference with the doctor. While his choice to shelter his son is well-intentioned, it is also patronizing. The idea that women and children should be sheltered from potential danger or distress, leaving men to bear the burden alone, promotes the false assumption that only men can maintain their wits and composure and respond with bravery and rationality. Furthermore, the father spends his day hunting quail while his son is sick, effectively killing as his son thinks he's dying. This again connects masculinity with death, and specifically with control or bravery in its face. Hunting is also a typically masculine pursuit associated with men providing for their families; yet by going out to shoot quail, the father has basically abandoned his son when the boy needed him most. This again points to a sort of paradox or folly inherent to hypermasculine heroism. Learning from his father's example, the boy in turn tries to shelter his family by keeping them away from his bedside, where they might catch his fatal illness while caring for him or experience terrible grief while watching him die. Yet the boy's pursuit of a fatalistic and selfless death does nothing but leave him terrified and isolated as he both denies himself the comfort of his family's presence at his "deathbed" and prolongs his tragic delusion. Unfortunately, in trying to emulate a heroic martyr's stoic embrace of death, the boy makes his father's mistake of assuming that he knows what's best for everyone else. His father believed that what was best for the boy was not hearing about his illness; now, the boy believes that what is best for his family is not seeing him suffer. When they withhold information to spare people pain, the father and son not only engage in an unnecessary martyrdom, but also directly limit the free will of those people who deserve to make their own choices. As the story illustrates, such overprotectiveness is too often a paternalistic mistake that men feel entitled to make when they feel heroically duty-bound to exercise their "superior" nerve and brains. Even as Hemingway's story present a certain ideal of masculinity, it also implicitly links this "heroism" to a distinct sense of miscommunication and suffering. As such, the story is as much a condemnation as it is an appreciation of traditional fatalistic heroism, the insistence on which does little to actually spare another from pain.
- Theme: Maturity and Innocence. Description: In "A Day's Wait," the nine-year-old Schatz clearly attempts to emulate the adults around him. He approaches his impending "death" with a brave face that not only reflects the story's conception of ideal masculinity, but further points to the child's equation of growing up with a sense of stoic acceptance and lack of emotionality. His father, meanwhile, reveals a glaring ignorance of his son's maturation, often treating the boy like a much younger child than he is. The father's blind paternalism heightens the boy's internal suffering by leaving him in the dark to fear the worst, and failing to recognize and soothe the boy's fears when they appear in a more muted manner than a young child's openly emotional demeanor. Hemingway's story ultimately reveals the broader parental urge to deny their kids autonomy and fail to recognize when they're growing up. Throughout the story, the father ignores his son's efforts to exhibit maturity and acts as if the boy is younger than he is, effectively denying that he is growing up. The boy doesn't want to be coddled, claiming that he is "all right" and does not need to go back to bed like his father tells him to. When his father offers to read to him so he won't be bored, the boy doesn't admit that he would like to be read aloud to, only saying, "If you want to." He won't indulge any desire for company or comfort, instead telling his father to leave him if "it"—that is, watching him "die"—"bothers" him. Later, the boy refuses to let anyone else into the room, insisting, "You can't come in […] You mustn't get what I have." The boy's belief that maturity means hiding all weakness and pretending to know everything may be misguided, but his father has not helped him to figure out a true path to maturity, preferring instead to act as if his son is still a simple child. Furthermore, that his father affectionately calls his son "Schatz," a German term of endearment that means "darling" or "sweetheart," reflects love and affection yet is also somewhat infantilizing—further suggesting that the father fails to see his child as a maturing young man. When the boy says, "I don't worry…but I can't help from thinking," his father responds, "Don't think…Just take it easy." Telling someone "Don't think" is rarely good advice, and here it suggests how the father believes he can still control how his son perceives the world. He imagines that his son respects his judgment unquestionably rather than holding distinct, informed opinions. The father's ignorance of his son's maturing consciousness leads him to exclude the boy from his discussion with the doctor, thinking it unnecessary to involve his "Schatz" because the boy would just follow his father's lead and not become alarmed. Because he does not think of his son as intellectually complex, he is unable to recognize the boy's internal distress after the doctor's visit, perceiving his mental agitation ("He […] seemed very detached from what was going on," "[H]e was not following what I was reading," "[H]e was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely") as physical affliction: "I thought perhaps he was a little lightheaded." The father can effectively read the boy's bodily symptoms, despite his protests to the contrary—"I saw he looked ill. He was shivering, his face was white, and he walked slowly as though it ached to move […] 'You better go back to bed.' 'No. I'm all right.' 'You go to bed.'"—but he cannot perceive his son's separate thoughts. However, his son is certain that he has legitimate knowledge of his own. He refuses to simply accept his father's vague assurances that "Your temperature is all right […] It's nothing to worry about," and "Of course" the medicine "will do […] good." His father could have explained to him exactly what the doctor had said—that "One [pill] was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition. The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained. He seemed to know all about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees"—but he does not think such a detailed answer is necessary to reassure his son when his word alone should be enough. Even when the father finally addresses his son's specific fear—"You aren't going to die […] People don't die with a fever of one hundred and two"—the boy retorts, to his father's surprise, "I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can't live with forty-four degrees." The boy no longer trusts his father's assurances after his father wouldn't tell him the medical truth to begin with, and requires thoroughly factual evidence to convince him. The next day, the boy becomes more childlike, crying "very easily at little things that were of no importance." This change in demeanor from how he carried himself at the beginning of the story suggests how he had freely expressed his feelings in the past. As a young child, his emotions were much closer to the surface and more transparent. As he has aged, he has developed control over he expresses his emotions, but his father underestimates this self-restraint and still expects the boy's feelings to surface. When the boy exhibits no familiar signs of distress, his father wrongly assumes he is unconcerned. The dramatic revelation of his son's developing consciousness and strengthening willpower will hopefully lead the father to overcome his resistance to the boy's maturation, because otherwise the boy is dependent on other, less suitable figures to guide him. When his father won't talk to him about death and adulthood, he gets his ideas from unrealistic popular narratives (The Book of Pirates, for example) or other flawed sources. When "A Day's Wait" was first published in 1933, Hemingway's own son would have been ten years old, barely older than "Schatz." An older child's inevitable maturation and its accompanying pitfalls would clearly have been on the author's mind as he witnessed his own son at that age, and in this story he rebukes the parent's reluctance to accept his child's evolution into a more independent and equally complex being.
- Climax: The young boy asks his father when he's going to die.
- Summary: The unnamed narrator of this story, the father of a nine-year-old boy nicknamed Schatz, notices one morning that his son seems ill. He urges the boy to go back to bed, but the boy denies that he's sick until his father feels his forehead and confirms that he has a fever. The doctor comes to examine the boy. He takes the boy's temperature and tells them that the boy has a fever of 102 degrees. Downstairs, the doctor gives medicine to the boy's father and diagnoses the boy with mild influenza, which he says isn't dangerous as long as the fever stays below 104 degrees. When the doctor leaves, the father reads to his son aloud from a book about pirates. He notes that the boy looks very pale and inattentive. Eventually the boy tells his father that he doesn't have to stay in the room with him, "if it bothers you." His father denies this, but the boy only repeats himself, "No, I mean you don't have to stay if it's going to bother you." Reasoning that his son must be feeling a bit lightheaded, the father gives him more medicine and leaves him alone to rest. The father heads outside with his dog to hunt quail. The landscape is entirely coated with frozen sleet. He kills several birds with difficulty due to the icy conditions, but he is happy to have found a covey of quail so close by and looks forward to hunting more birds in the future. When he returns home, the father learns that the boy hasn't allowed anyone to come into his room, insisting that no one else must catch his fever. The father goes in, anyway, and takes his temperature again: 102.4 degrees. The boy asks about the temperature, and his father says it's nothing to worry about. The boy admits that he can't help thinking about it. His father gives him the next dose of medicine, and the boy asks if it will do any good. His father assures him that it will, but the boy still seems preoccupied. Suddenly the boy asks his father what time he's going to die. The father is startled and reassures him that he isn't going to die. The boy replies that he heard the doctor say his temperature was 102 degrees, and he learned from his classmates in France that a fever over 44 degrees is deadly. The father realizes that his son has spent the whole day waiting to die. He explains to the boy that France and America use different thermometers and units of temperature, just like they use different units of distance—miles and kilometers. The boy simply says "Oh," but his whole body relaxes. The story ends with the father noting how the next day the boy had loosened his "hold over himself" so much that "he cried very easily at things that were of no importance." | 5,031 |
- Genre: Fiction; short story; literary realism
- Title: A Family Supper
- Point of view: First-person
- Setting: Kamakura, Japan
- Character: Narrator. Description: The narrator of "A Family Supper," who remains unnamed, is a young Japanese man who is living in America when he learns that his mother has died by eating a poisonous fish called fugu. At the beginning of the story, the narrator reveals that before he learned of his mother's death, "[his] relationship with his parents had become somewhat strained." Two years after his mother's death, the narrator returns to his childhood home in Kamakura, Japan to visit his father and his younger sister, Kikuko. During the his first conversation with his sister, he informs her that he is no longer with his girlfriend Vicki, and that he is unsure whether or not he will return to California. While remembering the fact that they used to believe that a ghost haunted the well in their backyard, Kikuko tells her brother that their mother "never blamed [him]" and that she did not think that she and the narrator's father raised him as well as they did Kikuko. The suggestion that the narrator's decision to move to America deeply hurt his parents is confirmed later, when the father explains that the mother did not understand the narrator's choices in life. During the climax of the story, the narrator confronts his father about his business partner Watanabe's suicide, and the father not only reveals the violent details of the suicide that he previously withheld, but also admits his hope that both of his children will move back home. However, it seems unlikely at the end of the story that the narrator really will return for good.
- Character: Father. Description: The narrator's father, who also remains unnamed throughout the story, is a Japanese man of retirement age. The narrator describes him as stoic, "formidable-looking," and "proud of the pure samurai blood that ran in the family." At the beginning of the story, the father picks the narrator up from the airport, where they have an awkward conversation about the collapse of his law firm and the fact that Watanabe, his partner at the firm, committed suicide out of shame as a result. During this first conversation, the narrator's father says that he considers Watanabe "a man of principle." When he gives his son a tour of his home, which includes a model of a battleship that he has taken up building for a hobby, it becomes clear that his wife's death, as well as the death of his partner Watanabe, has caused him a great deal of loneliness and loss of purpose. During a pivotal conversation that serves as the climax of the story, he reveals that his partner also killed his own wife and children, and he says that "there are other things besides work," a statement that charts a change in his perspective with regard to Watanabe's suicide. During this vulnerable moment, he expresses the hope that both of his children will return home, but neither of them appears interested in the prospect.
- Character: Mother. Description: Though the narrator's mother is not alive during the short story, her presence looms large in the lives of her family members. At the beginning of the story, the narrator explains that his mother died a "hideously painful death" after eating an improperly prepared poisonous fish called fugu at a friend's house, where she was invited for dinner. Her death's connection to upholding conventional expectations of etiquette furthers the theme of the painful consequences of sticking to traditional values. Throughout the course of the story, the mother takes on a ghost-like quality. First, while discussing a childhood belief that the well in the backyard was haunted by a ghost, the narrator tells his sister Kikuko that he sees a ghost in the form of an old woman in a white kimono, and she thinks that he is trying to scare her. Later, the narrator sees a photograph of an old woman by the same description on the wall, and his father is surprised to discover that the narrator does not recognize the woman in the photograph as his mother. When the father takes the son on a tour of the home, he reveals his suspicion that the mother's death was not an accident, but a suicide, explaining that she suffered from "many worries. And some disappointments."
- Character: Kikuko. Description: Kikuko is the narrator's bubbly and energetic younger sister, who returns to her childhood home from university in Osaka for the family supper. Though she is obedient to her father, her behavior at the house demonstrates that she has an inclination toward independence and is beginning to shake off the traditional gender role that her father wants her to fulfill. In her first private conversation with her brother, she smokes and hides her cigarette, and reveals that she is interested in hitchhiking in America with her boyfriend Suichi. She also tells her brother that their father did not tell him the complete story about Watanabe's suicide, explaining that Watanabe not only killed himself, but also violently murdered his wife and two children. In this way, Kikuko serves as a contrast to the narrator's neutrality when it comes to confronting the tragedy of recent events. Without her intervention, the narrator might not have initiated the vulnerable conversation about life, death, and work with his father that occurs toward the end of the story. The siblings' father says that he would like Kikuko to move home, but she does not seem to intend to do so.
- Character: Watanabe. Description: Like the narrator's mother, Watanabe is never physically present during the events of the short story. However, the narrator, his father, and his sister discuss the fact that he killed himself after the collapse of the father's law firm several times, and, like the mother of the family, the violent nature of his passing seems to haunt the family. While talking with the narrator in the backyard, Kikuko reveals that Watanabe murdered himself by stabbing himself in the gut--recalling the way in which Japanese samurai committed acts of honor suicide—and subsequently murdered his wife and two children.
- Theme: Heritage and Tradition. Description: "A Family Supper" follows an unnamed narrator returning to his native Japan from the United States two years after learning of his mother's death. Though the story is not clearly set during a particular period of time, readers can assume that the story is set in the modern day due to the presence of modern technology and language familiar to 21st-century readers. This modern setting creates a clear tension between the progressive sensibilities of the story's unnamed narrator and the perspective of his parents' generation. The narrator's observations about the circumstances of his mother's passing, as well as his conversations with his father and younger sister Kikuko, reveal conflicting perspectives on the role of traditional values in modern life. Ishiguro questions the value of upholding tradition for tradition's sake by demonstrating the ways in which his characters' tendency to fulfill traditional cultural expectations has painful consequences in their lives. Ishiguro quickly establishes the commitment to honor and self-sacrifice prioritized by Japan's older generations. Central to the story is the death of the protagonist's mother, who died after eating a fish called fugu that is poisonous to humans if prepared incorrectly. According to the narrator, the mother did not typically eat fugu—a traditional Japanese dish popularized during the war—but ate it in order to avoid offending a friend who invited her to dinner. Her resultant death must have been "hideously painful." Another key event is the suicide of Watanabe, the narrator's father's business partner. During the car ride home from the airport, the narrator's father explains that his law firm's collapse led Watanabe to commit suicide, an act that corresponds with the long history of honor suicide in Japan. In imperial Japan, the act of killing oneself after committing an unethical or shameful act was an acceptable, and even obligatory, form of penance. The ritual form of honor suicide practiced by Japanese samurai, called seppuku in Japan and hara-kiri in the West, entailed disemboweling one's stomach with a knife. The narrator's father, himself "particularly proud of the samurai blood that ran in the family," praises Watanabe on two occasions throughout the story, calling him a "man of principle and honour." The father's praise suggests that he approves of his partner's decision to kill himself after the dissolution of the law firm. For both Watanabe and the narrator's mother, it's clear that rigid respect for tradition has led to immense suffering. The story thus implicitly questions the worth of continuing to honor to such cultural expectations. By populating "A Family Supper" with intimate conversations between the narrator and his father about ethics and family values, Ishiguro demonstrates the narrator's youthful individualism and highlights how it contrasts with traditional Japanese cultural expectations. While discussing his father's new hobby, building model battleships, the narrator and his father briefly talk about his father's time serving in the Japanese Navy. The father assumes that his son doesn't "believe in war," which the son admits is true. Their differences in opinion demonstrate a marked contrast between the institutions and values that father and son respect, which Ishiguro suggests is at least partly due to their generational differences. The narrator's father's respect for Watanabe is complicated by the fact that he seems to adjust his assessment of the suicide at the end of the short story. When he finally opens up about the suicide during a private moment with his son, he admits that Watanabe brutally killed his wife and two children before killing himself, and concludes that "there are other things besides work" that one should value in life. The father's revelation suggests that the murder-suicide has him to reconsider what he once thought was honorable: self-sacrifice, stoicism, and a firm commitment to one's career. This incident, coupled with the death of his unhappy wife and the absence of his adult children, seems to have convinced the father that his generation's loyalty to these qualities may have destructive consequences in the lives of individuals and their loved ones. Furthermore, Ishiguro's decision to include a paranormal element in the story, the presence of a "ghost" in the backyard of the narrator's childhood home, illustrates that the death of traditional values is perhaps inevitable. When they were children, the narrator and his sister believed that the well in their backyard was haunted by a ghost. When Kikuko asks her brother if he sees a ghost by the well during his visit, he claims that he does, and describes an old woman in a white kimono. Kikuko cannot see the woman and thinks that her brother is trying to scare her. Later in the story, the narrator's father is surprised to find that the narrator does not recognize an old woman in a photograph as his mother. The woman in the photograph matches the description of the ghost. The narrator's failure to recognize his own mother is a result of the amount of time he has spent away from Japan, as well as the way in which his mother's face has changed due to the aging process. In this way, the narrator's moment of misrecognition represents the way in which he has become distanced from his cultural and familial roots. Unlike her brother, the narrator's sister Kikuko cannot see the ghost—which represents both the siblings' mother and the past itself (given that the siblings associate it with childhood memories). The fact that Kikuko, the youngest child in the family, is not "haunted" by the specter of the past suggests that traditions fade despite attempts to uphold them. This theme is even further evidenced by the fact that the siblings' father wants them to move back home to care for him, but that they have both set their sights on futures outside of Japan. Throughout "A Family Supper," Ishiguro questions the worth of cultural expectations and socially constructed values, especially when those values lead to suffering. By juxtaposing his young, Westernized narrator's views with those of the narrator's aging father, Ishiguro suggests that his characters' ideas about ethics are shaped by their ages, generations, and cultures. Furthermore, by demonstrating the ways in which his young characters are alienated from the "haunting" presence of their mother, and how they are largely uninterested in their father's traditional ways, Ishiguro illustrates the difficulty—and perhaps even impossibility—of preserving traditions in a more globalized generation of Japanese youth.
- Theme: Gender Roles and Expectations. Description: Though "A Family Supper" has a relatively uneventful plot, the story is rife with instances of cultural and societal expectations. One of the most prevalent of these is the pressure to adhere to traditional gender roles, which exert their influence on every member of the narrator's family. The narrator's father not only embodies the prototypical hard-working, stoic, and self-sacrificing Japanese father, but he also attempts to propagate traditional gender roles through his role as a parent—encouraging his daughter Kikuko, for instance, to step into the role of caregiver following her mother's death. However, despite his attempts to encourage his children to act according to Japanese gender customs, the siblings' desire to forge unique identities for themselves, regardless of gender, appears to ultimately overcome their father's influence. In addition to critiquing the value of unquestioned tradition, then, the story also suggests that traditional gender roles—however influential—are ultimately too restrictive and limiting to persist in the modern world. Ishiguro's depiction of Kikuko focuses in large part on the way in which she has begun to occupy some of the submissive, domestic, and maternal qualities expected of a traditional Japanese woman. The narrator's father praises Kikuko for completing domestic tasks and places her in the role of a mother or caretaker. For example, he calls her "a good girl" for preparing the food to be served at dinner, and he excludes her from a private conversation with the narrator by ordering her to make a pot of tea. The narrator notices Kikuko adhering to her father's orders whenever he is physically present, even if those orders are nonverbal. For example, describing the father's actions when he finishes looking at the photograph, the narrator says: "He held it out to Kikuko. Obediently, my sister rose to her feet…and returned the picture to the wall." Her tendency to submit to male authority, much like her willingness to complete domestic tasks, reflects her understanding of gender expectations of a respectable Japanese woman devoted to her family. At least within the confines of her childhood home, Kikuko temporarily fulfills these expectations, seemingly out of respect for her father. Ishiguro suggests that the influence of traditional gender expectations is so strong that both the narrator and his sister have begun to mimic certain gendered behaviors of their parents. The narrator, who has returned to Japan after living alone in the U.S., remarks to his father that he has left behind "empty rooms" in America, directly paralleling the remarks his father makes while explaining that their house in Japan is now too large for him after the death of his wife and the departure of his children. The protagonist's narration also emphasizes the fact that Kikuko fulfills her father's requests even though she often expresses hesitation before doing so. Kikuko's submission to her father's domestic demands parallels the relationship between her mother's death and gender-based ideas of etiquette. Her mother ate the poisonous fugu, a dish she "always refused to eat" in the past, because she did not want to offend a friend who invited her to dinner. However, it's also clear in the narrator's family that the influence of traditional Japanese gender roles, though still strong, is waning. Because the siblings' mother has died and their father is aging out of his ability to function as the head of the household, Kikuko and her brother are expected to step into their adult roles, suggesting that family structures and aging are wrapped up in the inheritance of traditional gender roles. Yet even as the narrator and his sister embody several features of their respective gender roles, they also challenge gender expectations in marked ways throughout the story. Despite Kikuko's apparent domesticity and obedience, Ishiguro reveals that she has not truly adopted all of the maternal or daughterly qualities her father expects of her, and she even rejects some of these qualities outright. For example, she smokes cigarettes (a habit she is clearly trying to hide, given that she attempts to cover up her cigarette butts in the garden) and proclaims a love for hitchhiking. Perhaps most important in terms of her rebellious qualities is her confession that, like her brother, she is interested in living in America. Like Kikuko, the narrator himself also moves away from the gendered expectations that his father still holds. The father comments more than once that he considers Watanabe, his former business partner, an honorable man for committing suicide after their law firm failed. Though the father seems to question this perception later on, it also seems that he wishes the narrator would follow Watanabe's masculine example by putting honor above everything else. However, the narrator clearly abhors Watanabe's actions and seems uninterested in becoming the kind of honorable businessman that his Watanabe and his own father epitomize. Finally, the narrator and Kikuko's reluctance to move home and take care of their father serves as a pointed rejection of the demands of traditional gender roles. Though it is clear that the father in the story wants both of his children to move back to their childhood home in Japan, Ishiguro implies that neither the narrator nor his sister plans on doing so. When the father asks the narrator if he plans to stay in Japan now that he has come to visit, he responds with ambivalence, and though Kikuko is also not certain about her future, she confides in her brother about her desire to move away from her boyfriend and her childhood home. In this way, though Japanese tradition dictates that respectable sons and daughters stay home to care for their aging parents, both children express very little interest in adhering to this custom. Gender roles exert a strong influence in "A Family Supper;" the story's narrator and his sister in particular fulfill many of the respective gender expectations of males and females in the domestic sphere. In fact, the narrator and Kikuko perform many of the habits and daily tasks of their mother and father, suggesting that they have learned from their parents' gender performances. Kikuko has filled the mother's role as the family caretaker to some extent, while the narrator may have become a lonely bachelor like his father. However, the fact that the siblings often diverge significantly from these roles, and that they both demonstrate a clear desire to leave the space in which they learned gendered habits, suggests that tradition is perhaps easier to circumvent for young people who are unmarried, relatively independent, and capable of imagining alternate futures for themselves beyond those prescribed for them by gendered traditions.
- Theme: Grief, Absence, and Presence. Description: "A Family Supper" centers around the death of the protagonist's mother, and so it is clear from the start that grief is one Ishiguro's primary thematic concerns. The consequences of the mother's passing—as well as the circumstances that led up to that unexpected event—are present on every page. By highlighting both literal and figurative forms of absence in a brief depiction of an uncomfortable family dinner, Ishiguro demonstrates the way in which grief fixates on a departed person's nonexistence, while simultaneously allowing their memory to haunt the spaces they have left behind. Though the narrator's family cannot speak candidly with one another about the depth of their grief, they express their complicated experiences of grief by acknowledging other painful absences (and presences) in the family home. Ishiguro employs empty space as a motif to highlight the ways in which the physical absence of the narrator's mother is felt by the members of his family. The sudden absence of the narrator's mother is emphasized by the conspicuous quantity of empty rooms in the house. While giving the narrator a tour of the changes to his childhood home, the narrator's father describes the empty rooms as useless and excessive, especially now that there is no one but him left to occupy them. Later, in a moment of vulnerability, the father suggests that his children move back into the home. In this way, not only is the mother's death brought into relief by her physical disappearance from the rooms she once occupied, but the father's largely unspoken grief is made apparent by his request that his children fill those unoccupied spaces once again. The presence of ghosts and the phenomenon of "haunting" in Ishiguro's narrative adds further depth to this tension between absence and presence. The ghost suggests that the characters in "A Family Supper" utilize the paranormal to navigate the irony of the fact that their mother is suddenly absent from their lives, but that the tragedy of her death makes them feel her presence more acutely than ever. The well in the backyard, which the siblings thought was haunted during their childhood, represents the narrator's mother and her memory. The first time the siblings mention their mother is in reference to the stories she told about the ghosts in the backyard. Later, the narrator looks out at the well while having an emotional conversation about death with his father, suggesting that he is thinking about his mother's passing. The well is haunted by a ghost whom the narrator describes as an elderly woman wearing a white kimono. At the end of the story, during the family supper for which the story is named, the narrator finally recognizes an elderly woman of the same description in a photograph as his mother. Though the narrator has returned home because of his mother's death, it is not until he recognizes the image of his elderly mother as "the ghost" that he appears to acknowledge the fact that by traveling to America, he missed a large portion of her life. Like his father's description of the house's empty rooms, the narrator's acknowledgment of the painful absence of his mother's death is mediated through entities that are still present: the ghost and its accompanying photograph. "A Family Supper" is saturated with numerous silences and lengthy pauses in conversation. These silences—literal absences of words—further highlight that which is ultimately inexpressible about grief, as well as the family's inability to verbally process the tragic nature of the mother's death. Throughout the narrator's visit, the family discusses the fact that their father's law firm partner, Watanabe, disemboweled himself. The narrator eventually learns that Watanabe also murdered his wife and two children. Rather than focusing on the death that has brought them together, the family fixates on this murder-suicide, again using a proxy to confront the loss that affects them most. The most significant silence in the short story occurs during the dinner itself. The lack of sustained conversation during the dinner seems to be primarily due to the family's inability to address the uncomfortable fact that they are eating fish, the same food that killed their mother. When the narrator asks his father what kind of fish he has prepared, he refuses to answer him directly, responding that it is "just fish." With the exception of a brief moment when the narrator's father mentions his suspicion that the mother's death was a suicide, the narrator's family largely avoids the topic and conceals specific details about her "hideously painful" death. The family's fixation on the violence of Watanabe's own suicide—and their more substantive conversations about its ethical ramifications—proposes that they are all grappling with the mother's death internally, but that they can only manage to articulate that struggle indirectly. Employing several forms of presence and absence—in the materiality of the home and its rooms, in the mysterious occurrences of the paranormal, and in the revelations and omissions that form the family's uncomfortable conversations—Ishiguro explores how grief seeks to understand and overcome the pain of losing a loved one. Though the family has difficulty frankly discussing the pain of the mother's death, the fact that they focus their conversations on emptiness, haunting, and silence, qualities associated with the sudden absence of a human being, suggests that they are still navigating profound grief. However, they are doing so by using a less painful shared language: that of their home, their childhood memories, and stories about someone outside the family.
- Climax: The narrator confronts his father about the details of Watanabe's suicide.
- Summary: The narrator, a young Japanese man who has been living in America, explains that fugu, a fish popularized in Japan after World War II, has a "special significance" to him because it killed his mother. His mother ate fugu, which is poisonous if prepared incorrectly, after a friend served it to her for dinner. The narrator adds that he learned the details of his mother's death two years after her passing, when he traveled to Japan to visit his family. The narrator's father picks him up from the airport and drives him to his childhood home. The narrator mentions the collapse of his father's law firm, and his father explains that he considers his partner Watanabe, who was so ashamed about the firm's collapse that he committed suicide, a "man of principle." They are soon greeted by the narrator's younger sister Kikuko. Kikuko is quiet around her father, but becomes more animated when he leaves the siblings alone. When the siblings go to the backyard to chat, Kikuko tells the narrator that she and her boyfriend are considering hitchhiking through America. The siblings then discuss the well in the backyard and the ghost that they used to believe haunted it. The narrator mentions Watanabe's suicide, and Kikuko reveals that Watanabe murdered his wife and two children before killing himself. Without responding directly to this news, the narrator tells Kikuko that he sees the ghost, and describes her as an old woman in a white kimono. Kikuko thinks he is trying to scare her. The siblings' father sends Kikuko to finish making dinner while he takes the narrator on a tour of the house. He shows the narrator several empty rooms, and then a single cluttered room that houses a model battleship. The father briefly confesses his belief that the narrator's mother committed suicide. When the family sits down to dinner, the narrator examines a photograph that depicts an old woman in a white kimono. The narrator's father is surprised that he doesn't recognize her as his own mother. When they begin to eat, the narrator asks the father what kind of fish he has prepared, and he replies: "Just fish." After a long silence, the narrator asks if there is enough fish for seconds. The father replies that there is plenty, and they all reach for more. After dinner, the narrator sits with his father in the tea-room. The narrator confronts his father about Watanabe's suicide. His father admits that Watanabe murdered his family, an act he labels "a mistake". The story ends as the father expresses his hope that his children will come back home to live with him. He admits his suspicion that the narrator will return to America, but believes that Kikuko will come home after finishing college. | 6,222 |
- Genre: War Novel
- Title: A Farewell to Arms
- Point of view: First-person; (Frederic Henry is the narrator.)
- Setting: Italy and Switzerland during World War I, 1916–1918
- Character: Lieutenant Frederic Henry. Description: An American who volunteers for the Italian ambulance corps before the United States joins the war. Various Italian characters also refer to him as "Tenente" (Lieutenant) or "Federico" (Frederic). Henry is a classic Hemingway hero in that he is a stoic who does his duty without complaint. Yet Henry also undergoes tremendous development through the course of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, he has never experienced true loss, believes that war is dreadful but necessary, has a lust for adventure, drinking, and women, and sees Catherine as just another diversion. As the stakes of the war intensify, however, he becomes deeply pessimistic about the war and realizes that his love for Catherine is the only thing he is willing to commit himself to.
- Character: Catherine Barkley. Description: An English nurse in Italy, she bears the spiritual scars of having lost her fiancé in the Battle of the Somme. When she meets Henry, she is ready to throw herself into a new relationship in order to escape the loss of the old one, enlisting Henry to pretend that they are deeply in love almost as soon as they meet. Emotionally damaged, she can never bring herself to marry Henry, but wants to be with him in an idealized union apart from the rest of the world. Through the constant understatements and deprecating humor in her dialogue, even at moments of extreme danger such as the labor that goes wrong, she reveals herself to be a stoic match for Henry, the female side of the Hemingway hero, who does much and says little.
- Theme: War. Description: A Farewell to Arms takes place in Italy during World War I, and the lives of all the characters are marked by the war. Most of the characters, from Henry and Catherine down to the soldiers and shop owners whom Henry meets, are humanists who echo Hemingway's view that war is a senseless waste of life. The few characters that support the war are presented as zealots to be either feared, as in the case of the military police, or pitied, such as the young Italian patriot Gino. To Henry, the war is, at first, a necessary evil from which he distracts himself through drinking and sex. By the end of the novel, his experiences of the war have convinced him that it is a fundamentally unjust atrocity, which he seeks to escape at all costs with Catherine.
- Theme: Love and Loss. Description: Much is made throughout the novel of Henry's aversion to falling in love. Yet in spite of his natural cynicism about love, he falls for Catherine. At the other end of the spectrum, Catherine craves love to an unstable degree, to the exclusion of everything else in the world. But their relationship is always surrounded by loss: the loss of Catherine's former lover to war before the novel begins, and the foreshadowing of the loss Henry will have to live with at the novel's end, when Catherine dies in childbirth. In fact, the incredible intensity of Henry and Catherine's relationship seems almost dependent on the loss surrounding them. Without the specter of loss threatening them from every side, Henry and Catherine would not have had to fight so hard to be together.
- Theme: Reality vs. Fantasy. Description: Throughout A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway shows how the harsh truths of reality always infiltrate and corrupt the distracting fantasies that characters create to make themselves feel better. In terms of war, Hemingway shows how ideals such as glory and honor quickly fade when one is confronted with the stark or absurd realities of battle—for instance, when Henry is maimed by a mortar shell while eating macaroni and cheese. Many characters create escapist fantasies to make the war around them easier to bear. Catherine pretends that she and Henry are deeply in love to escape the pain of her fiancé's death in battle. Henry's fellow officers celebrate America's entry into the war by drinking in a hospital that is being cleared out to make room for casualties. Most tragically, Henry and Catherine retreat from the world to live an idealized private life in the mountains of Switzerland, only to have the specter of reality return when Catherine and her baby die during childbirth.
- Theme: Self vs. Duty. Description: Henry is an ambulance driver and Catherine is a nurse, so each of them has a responsibility to others during wartime. However, as Henry's love for Catherine deepens and Henry begins to see that the war is unjust, he begins to adopt a philosophy of "every man for himself." When the Italian Army fractures during its retreat and the military police Henry because he is an officer, Henry makes a final break from the army and throws off his responsibilities. Following the priest's advice to find something he can commit to, for the second half of the novel Henry's chief and only concern is for Catherine. Even after escaping the war, neither of them wants the responsibility of having a child. By turning away from the world and trying to seek their own happiness, Henry and Catherine find more meaning in their relationship than in any other obligation.
- Theme: Manhood. Description: Henry is a classic Hemingway man: a stoic man of action with a personal code of honor who also enjoys the pleasures of life. For instance, the three doctors who fail to treat Henry's leg are the antithesis of Hemingway men. Besides being timid and unsure, they fail the test of manhood by refusing to drink with Henry when he offers. While Henry has many attributes of a Hemingway man at the start of the novel, he nonetheless evolves over the course of the novel. He gives up the macho posturing and womanizing of his fellow officers in favor of a life of commitment to Catherine. He also asserts his individualism by refusing to participate in what he sees as a corrupt and pointless war.
- Theme: Religion. Description: A saying that came out of the trenches, or foxholes, of World War I was, "There are no atheists in foxholes." Henry, who sees the world as a bitter realist, does not love God. However, he is not above turning to religion in times of crisis, as can be seen in the St. Anthony medallion he puts under his shirt before going into battle or his moving, desperate prayer when Catherine is dying. While Henry never becomes a conventionally religious man, he does follow the advice of the priest and Count Greffi, who in separate conversations outline a sort of humanist theology for Henry: he should commit with religious devotion to the person he loves, who is Catherine. Even this personal form of religion, however, fails Henry in the end.
- Climax: Catherine Barkley dies during childbirth.
- Summary: It is World War I, in 1916, and the Italian army is trying to hold off the united forces of Austria and Germany. The narrator, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, is an American who has joined the Italian ambulance corps as a volunteer. As the novel opens, Henry is about to take his winter leave. He spends the evening with his fellow officers, who mock the regiment's priest for his celibacy. Then the officers go to the officers' brothel for the night. When Henry returns from leave, his roommate Rinaldi introduces him to two English nurses, Catherine Barkley and Helen Ferguson, and although Rinaldi had been interested in Catherine, the immediate chemistry between her and Henry is obvious. On their first meeting, she tells him the sad story of her fiancé who was killed in the war, whose riding crop she still carries. As their flirting deepens in the following days, Henry is able to coax kisses from her, and she asks him to say he loves her before acknowledging that this is only a game. Soon, Henry goes to the first major battle in which he has taken part. He is innocently eating macaroni and cheese with the other ambulance drivers when a mortar shell crashes through his bunker, killing a driver and injuring Henry's leg. Henry is taken to an American hospital in Milan for treatment. When he arrives, he discovers the hospital is badly managed and the doctors are incompetent. Fortunately one doctor, Valentini, is able to remove the shrapnel from Henry's leg. While Henry is recuperating, Catherine Barkley is transferred to the hospital and when Henry sees her again, he realizes he loves her. She begins to sneak into his room at night and they conduct a love affair all summer. But Henry eventually has to return to the front. Before he leaves, Catherine tells him she is pregnant with his child. Henry returns to Gorizia and is plunged into battle. The Austrian and German armies have broken through the Italian lines, and a massive retreat from the front begins. Since the main road is blocked with so many vehicles, Henry and his ambulance drivers try to cut across the countryside. They become stuck in the mud, and two sergeants they have picked up try to flee rather than help. Henry shoots at them, hitting one. Another ambulance driver, Bonello, executes the sergeant with a bullet to the head. When they reach the Tagliamento River, there is a cordon of Italian military police who, out of paranoia and misguided patriotism, are shooting their own officers for having retreated. Henry escapes by diving into the river. He makes his way back to Milan, having decided that he will no longer fight for the Italian army or participate in the war. Henry learns that Catherine is in the Italian town of Stresa, a resort town near the Swiss border. He goes there, and he and Catherine reunite. Soon, Henry learns from a friendly bartender that the military police are coming to arrest him for desertion. He and Catherine escape across Lake Maggiore to Switzerland, where they successfully pass for tourists and receive visas to stay. In Switzerland, Henry and Catherine live outside the quiet ski town of Montreux, waiting for Catherine's baby to arrive and utterly content with each other's company. They go on holiday to the nearby town of Lausanne to be closer to the hospital. When Catherine's contractions begin, Henry takes her to the hospital. As the day progresses, it is clear that Catherine's labor is becoming increasingly complicated and dangerous. The doctors try to give her a Caesarian operation, but the baby is stillborn and Catherine eventually dies of multiple hemorrhages. Henry, now alone, walks back to his hotel in the rain. | 2,386 |
End of preview. Expand
in Dataset Viewer.
- Downloads last month
- 0